For years, every department store that left Alexandria Mall found a successor. By 1989, Wellan's was seven months behind on rent and gone. Years later, its old space was divided between Sam Goody and Stein Mart.
Burlington moved into the building Mervyn's had left. Bed Bath & Beyond took over the old Weiss & Goldring store, the one that had opened with the mall.
The run broke in 2018. Sears, a tenant since opening day, closed as one of 72 Sears stores shutting across the country. Stage, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Conn's followed it out.
Burlington left in 2024 and did not go far. It moved to MacArthur Village, a shopping center that had been trading since 1957, years before ground was broken on Masonic Drive. What the mall became after that goes back to the neighbors it had from the start.
Five department stores on Masonic Drive
About 30 stores were open on August 1, 1973, the day Alexandria Mall was dedicated on Masonic Drive in Alexandria, Louisiana. Others were getting ready to open, and the finished building had room for 55.
It was a single level under one roof, and it played on its own name, with a statue of Alexander the Great and the same figure on its early logo. Five department stores anchored it.
Sears and JCPenney each gave up an older Alexandria store to open there, Sears with an auto center built onto its building and JCPenney in about 131,800 square feet, the biggest store in the mall.
Weiss & Goldring and Wellan's were Alexandria companies, while Bealls came from Shreveport with the smallest of the five.
Shoppers already had other choices within a mile. MacArthur Village, about 0.7 mile northwest, had been trading since 1957.
A billboard had marked the Alexandria Mall site since October 1971, and ground was broken there in March 1972 for Broadhead & Associates, a developer from Meridian, Mississippi.
That August, Southgate Mall opened roughly half a mile west. Alexandria Mall followed less than a year later, and on Christmas Day 1973 General Cinema's twin theater inside it showed its first films.
A new wing for Dillard's and Mervyn's
Alexandria-area chefs made a pizza of about 650 pounds for the August 1986 celebration of the mall's new southeast wing.
Work had started in May 1985, and when the wing was dedicated on August 13, 1986, 44 new stores opened that day. The addition covered about 328,000 square feet on one level.
Dillard's opened at one end in a 102,000-square-foot store, and The Market Place, a food court with 19 counters, opened with the wing.
The wing's other department store came late. Mervyn's, in about 63,000 square feet, opened on October 17 after a construction delay. The 1973 building was renovated in the same project, with new skylights and new floors.
Its twin cinema was taken out, and in September General Cinema opened a freestanding six-screen theater on its own lot southeast of the mall.
The mall had opened with 55 retail spaces. After the expansion it covered about 869,700 square feet and held about 100 stores, seven department stores among them, with parking for roughly 5,000 cars.
That October, Metrocenter Mall was dedicated about 2,000 feet to the west.
The Wellan's and Bealls stores change hands
By July 25, 1989, Wellan's was seven months behind on rent. The Alexandria Mall store closed that day, ending the chain and leaving one of the mall's five original department stores empty for the first time.
The Wellan's space sat near the Sears end of the original building.
Its 32,000 square feet were later enlarged into the area beside it and divided, and by 1995 Sam Goody had opened in about 12,000 square feet of the old department store. The Sears wing and its entrance from the mall were remodeled in 1994.
Stein Mart took the rest. It opened in October 1995 in about 38,000 square feet made from the remainder of the Wellan's block and the space next to it, which gave the newcomer more room than Wellan's had ever had.
Bealls kept trading under new names. It was Beall-Ladymon by the mid-1980s, and after Stage Stores bought the business in 1994, the mall store carried the Stage name by 1995.
Burlington and Bed Bath & Beyond move in
By 2005 the mall belonged to a group of companies backed by Radiant Partners, and it was the only regional mall within 90 miles.
General Growth Properties had run its leasing and management since 2001, a job that passed to JLL in July 2010. Two of the mall's large stores closed in 2006: Mervyn's in January and Stein Mart at the end of April.
The interior was renovated that year, and in the same mid-2000s turnover Weiss & Goldring left the 60,000-square-foot store it had opened with and moved into a much smaller one elsewhere on the mall property.
Burlington Coat Factory opened in the old Mervyn's store in March 2007. Bed Bath & Beyond took the space Weiss & Goldring had left and opened there in 2008.
The Wellan's block changed hands again too. Slinkee's Family Fun Center moved into the former Stein Mart, and Lagniappe Theatre Company took the Sam Goody side.
Space the mall had built for department stores held off-price goods, home goods, a family entertainment center, and a theater company.
Walls go up for Conn's HomePlus
In 2015 the mall set out to turn the old Wellan's block back into one large store.
Slinkee's and Lagniappe Theatre Company lost their leases in September 2015, and part of the mall's interior was walled off so the new store could reach past the block's old edges. Conn's HomePlus opened there on February 13, 2016.
Its store was put together from the areas Wellan's, Sam Goody, Stein Mart, Slinkee's, and Lagniappe had used, which made Conn's the sixth tenant in that corner of the mall since 1973 and the first since Wellan's to fill that corner as a single store.
The play area for children was shifted farther along the corridor toward Sears. Kirkland's later moved into the space Piccadilly Cafeteria, one of the mall's first restaurants, had opened in 1973, close to the entrance on the Sears side.
By the time Conn's opened, that end of the mall held Sears, Kirkland's, and Conn's.
Sears closes and the large stores follow
Sears announced in May 2018 that its Alexandria Mall store was one of 72 it would close across the country. Its auto center was set to shut in late June, and the main store closed that September, after trading at the mall since the day it opened.
Stage closed in early 2019, and with it went the last of the names on the store Bealls had opened in 1973. Bed Bath & Beyond's closing was confirmed in January 2023, and the store shut that March.
Michaels announced its move to the mall in August 2023 and held its grand opening on February 24, 2024, in most of the former Bed Bath & Beyond space, the old Weiss & Goldring store.
Burlington announced in April 2024 that it would leave the mall for MacArthur Village at 1460 MacArthur Drive, and it moved that fall, staying in the same Alexandria shopping corridor.
Conn's went into bankruptcy and closed its store during the chain's shutdown, and its mall lease was rejected in October 2024.
By the end of that year, the store Sears had opened in 1973 and the one built for Mervyn's in 1986 were both empty, and so was the space put together for Conn's.
Alexandria Mall and the Masonic Drive plan
Smaller chains kept leaving. Aeropostale began a closing sale in January 2025, Kirkland's closed that October, Chick-fil-A shut its food-court restaurant at the end of the year after decades in the mall, and Bath & Body Works closed in January 2026.
Children's Exploration Oasis, a children's museum and play space that had been downtown, reopened in a former Victoria's Secret in April 2025, with one-hour sessions at $10 a person.
An airsoft course, an arcade, a dance studio, a fitness studio, and rented plush-animal rides in the common area have joined it. The mall rents carts, kiosks, and pop-up spaces by the weekend, the week, or the month.
The mall is open. Dillard's and JCPenney trade at either end of its busiest stretch of stores, and Weiss & Goldring keeps its smaller store on the mall property.
Michaels uses most of the old Bed Bath & Beyond space with a door only to the outside, and beside it a small mall entrance leads to a wall that closes the corridor off from the empty Conn's, Kirkland's, and Sears spaces.
The store Burlington left stands empty as well. Radiant Partners owns the mall, and JLL manages it. The mall is also one of the partners and meeting places in REIGNITE, the city's program of about $82 million in projects along the Masonic Drive corridor.
In April 2025 it hosted a seminar on leasing and using its vacant space, held inside the empty Conn's store.
The city held a REIGNITE open house in the food court in May 2026, after commissioning a market analysis of the corridor in March, and presented that analysis in August.
REIGNITE's public presentations have talked about bringing more recreation, dining, entertainment, and services to the corridor and to the mix of tenants inside the mall.
In September, council members took up an ordinance calling for a study of the plan's economic impact, and the program remains under public review.
The new wing of August 1986 put 44 stores into the mall in a single day and brought it to about 100. Now the mall's children's play area fills the old Stage store.
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