Lakeside Shopping Center in Metairie, LA is the last big mall standing on the New Orleans South Shore

Oakwood, Clearview, Lake Forest Plaza, Belle Promenade, The Esplanade.

Metro New Orleans built those five regional malls after Lakeside, and every one of them lost anchors, closed, or got converted into something else.

Lakeside Shopping Center is the enclosed mall at Veterans Memorial Boulevard and North Causeway in Metairie, Louisiana.

It opened March 24, 1960 as an open-air center with 13 tenants and three department stores, got roofed and cooled in 1968, and grew in stages to 1.2 million square feet.

Katrina is part of the answer. Lake Forest Plaza was already down to one anchor when Katrina flooded it, and it never came back.

Oakwood took fire and water damage and needed until 2007. Lakeside reopened after two months, on October 28, without either anchor.

Dillard's, Macy's and JCPenney are all still open in 2026, along with Apple, Zara, and more than 100 stores and restaurants.

Sixty-six years of construction and anchor changes, with the same owner since 1968.

Lakeside opened in 1960 with no roof

On March 24, 1960, 13 stores opened for business on a mostly empty stretch of Veterans Highway in Metairie, and the middle of the place was open to the sky.

The advertising described the stores as sitting under one roof.

Canopies covered the walkways and the storefronts had cover, but the pedestrian court in the center was open weather, and that court was how you got from one shop to the next.

Lakeside Shopping Center took up 52 acres of Jefferson Parish at what is now Veterans Memorial Boulevard and North Causeway Boulevard. Paul Kapelow, a local developer, developed the center.

Charles R. Colbert, a New Orleans modernist, drew the plans. His 1957 rendering had a five-story office tower on it. That got cut from the final plan.

Three department stores held the corners: D.H. Holmes on two levels at 115,000 square feet, Godchaux's at 46,000, and a small J.C. Penney at 43,200 that sold dry goods and not much else.

Among the early inline tenants were Paris Hats, Werlein's for Music, Turntable Records, Lakeside Toys, a Winn-Dixie, a Walgreens, and the Holloway House Cafeteria.

415,000 square feet of leasable space in that first phase. Families who had spent Saturdays on Canal Street started spending them in Metairie instead.

The summer they put a roof on

D.H. Holmes ran out of room fast. In April 1965 the store finished a third floor and grew to 172,500 square feet, before the center was six years old.

Then the competition arrived. Oakwood Center opened across the river on the West Bank in 1966.

Clearview was being planned a few miles up the road in Metairie. Both were built enclosed and air-conditioned.

The climate settled that argument. Heat and summer storms made an open-air court hard to defend against a building you could cool.

So Lakeside roofed its court and turned on the air conditioning, and the enclosed mall was dedicated on June 3, 1968.

The change was physical and immediate. Storefronts that had faced open weather now faced a hallway. The court people used to cross in the rain became a corridor with a ceiling.

That same year a family real estate company from New York bought the property. Louis Feil led the purchase, and the Feil Organization has owned Lakeside ever since.

One attraction had already shown up on its own. General Cinema opened Lakeside Cinema I & II in the northwest parking lot on August 4, 1967, two screens in a separate building.

Penney moved out, then moved back bigger

Godchaux's made the first move of the 1970s, rededicating a 9,000-square-foot addition on August 16, 1973.

Holmes went much bigger, rededicating a west addition on April 2, 1974 that pushed the store to 275,000 square feet on three floors.

Then J.C. Penney walked out of its own building. The chain stayed at Lakeside.

It just abandoned the 43,200-square-foot box it had opened in and put up a two-level, full-line store of 154,700 square feet, anchoring a brand new corridor called the West Mall.

It opened November 5, 1975, more than three times the size of the store it replaced, with a full line of merchandise.

Nobody knocked the old Penney down. Feil cut it into 20 shops and reopened it in June 1977 as the Promenade Mall, a small cluster of stores tucked inside the bigger one.

That brought Lakeside to 100 stores and services.

The cinema kept pace, growing from two screens to four by 1976 and eventually five.

By the end of the decade almost nothing about the property matched the 1960 photographs except the street corner it sat on.

When two anchors lost their names

The East Mall came first, dedicated October 15, 1981: 51,000 square feet and about 20 more stores down the east side.

Then two New Orleans names came off the walls.

Godchaux's closed in March 1987 after 27 years at Lakeside. By December the space had been split into ten units and reopened as Lakeside Market Fair.

Two years later, Dillard Department Stores bought D.H. Holmes. In May 1989 the Holmes sign came down from a store that by then filled 297,900 square feet.

The three-floor building stayed exactly where it was, with Dillard's on the front of it.

That same year Lakeside started a $20 million renovation: new common areas, the northeast parking garage, and a 12-bay food court fitted into space the mall already had.

When the work was finished, Lakeside had 742,700 square feet and roughly 130 stores.

If you picture this mall in your head, you are probably picturing the 1989 version. Everything built afterward was added to that frame.

Katrina hit, and the doors reopened in weeks

Hurricane Katrina came ashore on August 29, 2005. Lakeside took exterior damage. The main mall remained usable, though both anchors were heavily damaged. No deep interior flooding, no fire.

About half the stores were open again within two months. J.C. Penney was one of the first anchors back.

Dillard's needed more repair and later got a full renovation. Feil helped its own employees find housing while the work went on.

Other malls in the region did not come back the same way. Lake Forest Plaza in New Orleans East was already closed when Katrina flooded it, and it never came back.

Oakwood on the West Bank took fire, looting, and water damage, and its main mall did not reopen until 2007.

Through that first fall and winter of the recovery, Lakeside was one of the region's first large malls to reopen with dozens of stores under one roof.

People drove in for working stores and a place that felt normal.

The mall came out of the storm with its building usable, its owner still spending, and another expansion starting in 2006.

Macy's, Apple, and a million square feet

Lakeside's inline stores were selling $746.59 per square foot in 2006, well ahead of what most regional malls in the country were doing.

That kind of performance helped Feil borrow $95 million against the property in 2007, and made a third department store worth building at all.

Construction started in November 2007. Macy's opened on October 25, 2008: three levels, 228,000 square feet, on a new wing at the south side. Lakeside crossed one million square feet of retail space.

The garages went up because Macy's ate the parking lot. The site had 3,861 spaces before the work.

The southwest garage opened in October 2007 and the southeast garage opened in September 2008, adding 1,864 and 1,617 spaces between them.

One store beat Macy's to the ribbon by a month.

Apple opened on September 27, 2008, and it was, and still is, the only Apple store in the New Orleans market. That made it a regional draw for the building.

Dillard's finished its own renovation around the same time, which left the property with two three-level department stores and a two-level Penney.

Cheesecake, Zara, and locked doors in 2020

The Cheesecake Factory opened on June 17, 2014, in a 9,300-square-foot addition with its own entrance off the parking lot, the chain's first in Louisiana.

Fleming's took a freestanding building on October 30, 2017. Both could keep serving after the mall corridors shut for the night.

Feil spent $20 million between 2017 and 2019 on the food court and the common areas: new skylights, new lighting, new seating, new column finishes.

Zara opened 34,700 square feet on October 18, 2018, one of the largest spaces in the building that isn't a department store.

Adler's, the jewelry store, went the other direction in 2017 and moved out to its own place on Veterans Boulevard.

Then March 2020. Lakeside closed the common mall and Kids' Castle on March 18, before Louisiana's statewide stay-at-home order.

Curbside pickup started in May, with customers pulling into marked zones inside the parking garages.

On May 19, 2020, 41 stores reopened for in-person shopping, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. on Sunday.

JCPenney filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy that same month. The Lakeside store survived, even after briefly landing on a closure list that June.

65 years old and out of empty space

Apple grew from 5,260 to 7,830 square feet in 2022 and moved beside an exterior entrance, which cut the walk from the car.

Arhaus opened a 14,000-square-foot showroom next to Dillard's in late 2023 with two front doors, one into the mall and one facing Causeway Boulevard.

Lee Michaels left the corridors for its own 10,400-square-foot building out front.

Then 2025, the 65th year, got strange.

Alo opened May 29. Mango in June. Garage on October 10, Rowan on October 11, Vuori on November 14, several of them the first of their kind anywhere in Louisiana.

After leaving Canal Place downtown, Anthropologie opened in the Macy's wing out here on November 28.

Forever 21 closed the same year when its U.S. operator liquidated the chain's stores, and the space got absorbed anyway.

By the holidays Lakeside had no regular retail space left to lease, the first time that had happened in at least seven years. Seasonal sellers had to take kiosks.

The building work carried into this year. Coach on March 6, the only full-price Coach in the state. Chicken Salad Chick in the food court on March 27.

Gorjana next to Vuori in early May. Foot Locker reopened at 9,332 square feet. Clarks on June 26. Aritzia is still listed as coming soon in a 9,200-square-foot space.

That leaves 1.18 million square feet, more than 100 stores and restaurants, and Dillard's, Macy's and JCPenney all still open.

The doors unlock an hour before the stores do, for the walkers doing laps of the corridors, and Kids' Castle is still in there with its climbing structure for whoever brought a toddler along.