Acadiana Mall opened in Lafayette in 1979 with the French Quarter worked into its interior. Brick covered the walkways; wrought iron and old-fashioned lamps carried the theme.
By 7 a.m. in later years, the walkers were already inside, and Christmas brought Santa. Many shoppers came in through the food-court doors, past a five-screen cinema.
Acadiana Mall's parking lot became a launch point for Katrina rescues. Around 4 a.m., two days after the storm, hundreds of people and boats gathered there before heading for New Orleans as part of the volunteer response that became known as the Cajun Navy.
Sears, there from the first day, closed in 2017. Its building now rents out storage units under a bright red roof.
Macy's closed last year, and Forever 21 went dark within weeks. Five years earlier, closing signs had gone up at JCPenney too. That time they came down.
Sears signed on before construction began
Around 1972, Sears was already committed while a Lafayette developer was still assembling land on the south side of the city for a shopping mall.
The mall grew beyond what he wanted to tackle alone, bringing Robert B. Aikens & Associates and Homart Development Company into the development team.
The project was announced in March 1977, and construction began later that year.
Not every department store would stand on the developers' ground.
In December 1977 a realty company bought nearly 11 acres for one of them and put up a 121,200-square-foot store on it for $4.1 million.
It leased the land and the building to Goudchaux's. From the start, that anchor had an owner of its own, separate from the mall it was attached to.
Acadiana Mall opened in Lafayette, Louisiana, on March 28, 1979, at Johnston Street and Ambassador Caffery Parkway, with Sears, Goudchaux's, Selber Bros., and D. H. Holmes as its department stores.
A five-screen General Cinema followed beside the food court in May 1979.
The formal front faced Johnston Street, but many shoppers used the food-court doors on the Ambassador Caffery side.
The enclosed concourse stayed on a single floor while the department stores rose above it.
Brick covered the walkways; wrought-iron trim and gas-lamp-style fixtures carried the interior theme, and storefront signs weren't backlit.
JCPenney moved over from Northgate
Lafayette's first enclosed mall was Northgate, which had opened in August 1969, a decade before Acadiana, and JCPenney was one of its stores.
By 1990 Acadiana was the younger mall on the south side and had grown into the larger regional center of the two.
At Acadiana, the anchors were already changing.
In 1989 Dillard's bought D. H. Holmes, the department store chain based in New Orleans, and the Holmes store took the Dillard's name.
Selber Bros. closed by 1990, leaving its building empty.
JCPenney announced in April 1990 that it would leave Northgate for Acadiana.
The new JCPenney opened on November 13, 1991, the same day the mall unveiled a $5 million renovation of its own.
It occupied the former Selber site, where the old building had been torn down for the larger JCPenney.
The cinema left, and the mall got a new name
By January 1999, films were gone from the five-screen cinema beside the food court.
It had opened under General Cinema in 1979, then passed to Carmike in 1995 after about 16 years.
Carmike later added a 10-screen theater at the edge of the property, leaving the indoor screens to second-run movies.
Retail followed the closure, with Sam Goody and Abercrombie & Fitch among the stores that took over the former cinema.
The anchor that had opened as Goudchaux's kept changing its sign through those years. By the late 1980s it traded as Maison Blanche.
It became Parisian in 1998 and Foley's in 2001, each time in the same building on its separate parcel.
In the late 1990s the Lafayette developer who had started the project sold his remaining interest to Aikens. Aikens still owned the center in 2004.
That year, the old interior and the old name both gave way: a major renovation updated the common areas, and Acadiana Mall became The Mall of Acadiana.
CBL bought the mall and removed the fountain
CBL & Associates Properties paid $175 million for The Mall of Acadiana in July 2005.
By 2006 the mall held more than 100 stores and restaurants, among them Banana Republic, Hollister, Ann Taylor, and Coldwater Creek.
That September the Foley's store became Macy's, the fifth name on the anchor that had opened as Goudchaux's.
In 2007 CBL borrowed $150 million against the mall. By the end of 2012, every foot of mall-store space was leased.
In February 2013 CBL brought back the Acadiana Mall name and launched a remodel set to finish before Christmas. Outside, the entrances and landscaping were redone.
Inside came fresh paint and graphics, larger restrooms, and new tables and chairs in the food court.
New backdrops behind the vendors' signs, reworked ceilings, and partitions broke up the seating.
At center court stood a raised platform with a fountain that no longer ran.
Both were removed, and by December 2013 the spot sat level with the surrounding floor, an open walkway through the middle of the mall.
Sears closed, and the mall went back to its lender
The Sears building had changed owners before the store left.
In 2015 it passed, with its land, to Seritage Growth Properties, the real-estate company Sears spun off, and from then on the store's building and the mall had different owners.
The mall itself was selling less. Its shops had averaged $435 a square foot in 2014, and by 2016 they were below $375. The $150 million loan came due in April 2017.
In June, Sears announced that its Lafayette store would close.
The auto center shut first, and the two-level main store closed on September 17, 2017, a closing that affected 72 workers.
CBL and the loan's servicer worked on a plan to split the debt and push back its due date, and the deal never closed.
The mall went into foreclosure and was run by a receiver.
In January 2019 CBL handed it to the lender to settle the debt, and Namdar Realty Group bought it for $39 million, against the $175 million CBL had paid in 2005.
H&M arrived, and JCPenney's closing signs came down
Namdar bought the Macy's building separately from CBL in January 2019 for $2.5 million.
With it came an anchor still trading, but only downstairs; by 2019 the upper level had been given over to online-order work.
H&M opened a store of about 16,000 square feet in the Macy's wing at noon on November 21, 2019, across from Forever 21.
That year the mall and its stores employed more than 2,500 people.
JCPenney's building changed hands in July 2019 too.
A Lionheart Capital affiliate bought it for about $700,000, and JCPenney stayed on as a tenant, paying rent on a store it had owned.
In June 2020 the Lafayette store landed on the list of locations the chain planned to close in its bankruptcy, and closing signs went up.
By that July they were gone. Mason Asset Management, the leasing firm for the mall, had negotiated with the chain, and the Lafayette JCPenney stayed open.
The Sears building turned into self-storage
From the closing in September 2017 until 2022, the two-level Sears and its auto center sat empty while Seritage held them.
In 2022 Seritage sold the building, roughly 197,000 square feet, to Star Lafayette LLC for $1.5 million.
The buyer proposed turning the old store into self-storage and putting a car wash where the auto center had been.
Only half of that plan was ever built. The car wash was dropped.
The storage conversion went ahead inside the old walls, with the building kept rather than torn down, but it did not fill the whole former store.
By May 2024 the outside had a bright red roof and red trim under the CubeSmart name.
The building at 5715 Johnston Street, joined to the mall complex, later became a self-storage facility with climate-controlled units.
No other original department store at the mall had been turned from retail to another use.
Macy's closed, and the mall stayed open
In January 2025 Macy's named the Lafayette store among 66 in its next round of closings, and the store closed that March, about 18 and a half years after it took the Macy's name.
Forever 21, across from H&M in the same wing, closed at the end of the month, during the chain's second bankruptcy.
Its store of about 14,000 square feet sat empty until September 2025, when it opened for a Rhea Lana's children's consignment sale; Rhea Lana's returned in March 2026 and again that September.
Acadiana Mall is open, with more than 70 retailers in its directory.
National chains such as H&M, American Eagle Outfitters, and Victoria's Secret share it with more local shops, kiosks, and service businesses than it held in the CBL years.
Dillard's owns its building, and JCPenney leases its store from the Lionheart affiliate.
The Macy's building, about 185,000 square feet over two levels, is empty and marketed for lease.
The former Sears is a CubeSmart self-storage facility with an owner of its own. Namdar owns the mall that connects them, and Mason Asset Management handles its leasing.
At the end of 2012, every foot of mall-store space was leased. Two of the mall's department stores, Dillard's and JCPenney, are trading.
The largest empty store on the property is a department store, and another former department store rents out storage units.
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