Stores Lafayette Lost That We'd Do Anything to Get Back

LAFAYETTE, La. — Lafayette keeps a long list of places that no longer exist but refuse to fully leave. For anyone who grew up shopping Acadiana Mall on a Saturday, browsing Northgate with nothing specific in mind, or marking a milestone over dinner at a restaurant that closed years ago, losing a local institution is nothing like a generic store-closing notice.

These were the places where routines got built. Back-to-school shopping, post-game dinners, lazy Sunday afternoons with nowhere to be. A lot of them are gone now, for reasons ranging from national bankruptcies to real estate complications to the simple passage of time. Some of those exits were inevitable. Some were painful in ways that still haven’t been accounted for.

This is the list Acadiana would do just about anything to undo.

The Abdalla Family and the End of a Lafayette Retail Dynasty

For a certain generation in Lafayette, Abdalla’s isn’t really a store. It’s a memory tied to a specific school year, a first dress, or the particular atmosphere of a fitting room that knew what it was doing.

The Abdalla family story is one of the great retail sagas in Acadiana history. George Abdalla, a Lebanese immigrant, arrived in the Opelousas area around 1895 and eventually planted roots across South Louisiana with his wife Jasmine. By the early 1930s, the family had opened a Lafayette location on Jefferson Street. Over the decades that followed, Abdalla’s became the kind of store where clerks knew customers by name, where generations of kids got their school shoes, and where “going to Abdalla’s” meant something specific to the families of this region.

The Oil Center location closed in 2005, but the family’s retail presence continued at 101 Arnould Blvd. Brother’s on the Boulevard opened in 1976, run by Ed “Brother” Abdalla IV and his wife Catherine. It ran for 43 years on a reputation that reached well beyond Lafayette. Tommy Hilfiger, early in his career, counted Brother’s as his largest single-door account. After the Saints won the Super Bowl, receiver Devery Henderson made the trip to Arnould Boulevard to find a line already wrapped around the building by 3:30 in the morning.

When Ed Abdalla announced the store would close in September 2019, The Advocate reported that it triggered a four-day buying frenzy. “It has been bittersweet coming to this decision because we love our customers and have thoroughly enjoyed dressing them over the years,” Abdalla said. Brother’s closed on Christmas Eve, 2019. Nothing has come close to filling that particular spot in Lafayette retail since.

Northgate Mall: Lafayette’s Original Shopping Destination

Before Acadiana Mall opened on March 28, 1979, Northgate was the destination.

Northgate was Lafayette’s first major indoor mall, located at 1800 NE Evangeline Thruway, and for the generation that grew up with it, it was simply the center of things. People drove in from Carencro, Scott, and St. Martinville on weekends just to walk the halls. The tenant list in its prime reads like a nostalgia checklist now: Montgomery Ward, K&B Drugs, Weingarten’s grocery, Gordon’s Jewelers, Kay-Bee Toy & Hobby, Aladdin’s Castle, Musicland, A&G Cafeteria, TG&Y, JCPenney. At one point, a local radio station even kept a studio inside the building.

K&B Drugs, the Louisiana original known for its distinctive purple bags, held on until Rite Aid acquired the chain in 1998. Montgomery Ward collapsed in a national bankruptcy. TG&Y became McCrory’s and was gone by 2001. Weingarten’s was absorbed into the Safeway network. Each departure trimmed something from the experience until there wasn’t much left of what the original mall had been.

Northgate was purchased recently by local contractor Jacoby Landry for approximately $2.8 million and is being rebranded as The Hub. That redevelopment effort is genuinely worth rooting for. But anyone who walked those halls when every anchor was operating understands that the version of Northgate that made Lafayette’s shopping culture is not what’s coming back.

Macy’s, Sears, and the Anchor Store Era at Acadiana Mall

Acadiana Mall opened in 1979 as the new standard for Lafayette retail, and for a long stretch it delivered on that promise. Multiple department stores anchored each end. The food court had actual foot traffic. Going to the mall on a Saturday was a social event with some shopping attached, not the other way around.

Sears was there from the first day. The store opened with the mall in 1979, occupying a building of approximately 197,000 square feet, and held a loyal customer base in Lafayette for nearly four decades. For a generation of Acadiana homeowners, the automotive service center alone was reason enough to make the trip. The store closed in the summer of 2017 as part of a national retreat that eventually pushed Sears into bankruptcy the following year. After sitting vacant for years, the building sold in 2022 and became an Extra Space Storage facility.

Sears Logo, (Photo by Tim Boyle/Getty Images)

Circuit City held a prime position near the mall on Johnston Street, and for anyone who bought electronics in the late 1990s or early 2000s, it represented something specific: a staff that actually knew the products, a selection wide enough to matter, and the deliberateness of choosing something you were going to keep for years. The Lafayette Superstore location at 5624 Johnston Street closed in March 2009, taken down in the same national bankruptcy that ended the chain. Best Buy is still there. It is not the same shopping experience.

Macy’s was the most recent anchor loss. The Acadiana Mall location topped 185,000 square feet and was the only Macy’s in Louisiana on the company’s 2025 closing list. It shut down in March 2025. Dillard’s and JCPenney are now the only remaining anchors in a mall that once had far more.

Acadiana Mall opened with Goudchaux’s as an anchor, a Baton Rouge-based department store that entered the Lafayette market at the mall’s 1979 opening. After a 1982 acquisition of New Orleans-based Maison Blanche, the combined chain eventually ran 24 stores before Dillard’s purchased the parent company, Mercantile Stores, in 1997. The Lafayette anchor itself followed a different path: it was sold to Parisian in 1998, rebranded as Foley’s in 2001, and finally became Macy’s in 2006 — the same Macy’s that closed in March 2025, completing a half-century arc from Goudchaux’s to gone.

Sam Goody and the Record Store That Raised a Generation

There was a specific kind of Saturday afternoon that belonged to the music store. You didn’t go in with a plan. You flipped through the racks, read the back of something you’d never heard, and walked out with something you didn’t know you needed. It was browsing in the fullest sense of the word, and Musicland/Sam Goody at Acadiana Mall was where a generation of Lafayette music fans did exactly that.

Best Buy acquired Musicland in 2001 and sold it off not long after. Most locations converted to FYE or simply closed. Physical music retail as a category is effectively finished at this point. Streaming handled the rest. But the experience of discovering music by standing in a store and holding something in your hands is genuinely gone, and no streaming interface has replicated what that felt like.

Café Vermilionville: Forty-Two Years in a Building That Survived the Civil War

Café Vermilionville operated for 42 years at 1304 W. Pinhook Road in a structure built around 1835. That building — a two-story Greek Revival home on the National Register of Historic Places — served as the Vermilionville Inn for decades, then as a Union Army headquarters and field infirmary during the Civil War, before eventually becoming the restaurant Lafayette knew beginning in 1981.

In those 42 years, the dining room hosted Anthony Bourdain, dignitaries, celebrities, and the kind of regular Acadiana families who mark important occasions with a good meal. The courtyard concert series was as much a community institution as anything on the menu. National publications and television programs came through. Lafayette claimed it as its own.

Owners Ken and Andrea Veron announced the closing in June 2023, citing a complex real estate situation. Their farewell post was brief and graceful: “While our hearts will forever be at half mast, we’ll be raising our glasses to the best place we’ve ever known, and we hope you can, too. It’s been a good run, Lafayette — we love you.”

The building has sat without a comparable restaurant tenant since. Lafayette has not settled on a replacement for what Café Vermilionville was.

Toys R Us and the Chains That Came and Went

The Toys R Us at 5700 Johnston Street closed with the national chain in 2018. Ollie’s Bargain Outlet eventually moved into the space. There is no true equivalent to walking into tens of thousands of square feet of toys as a kid in the 1980s or 1990s, and there probably won’t be again.

Other departures worth putting on the record: Stein Mart, which closed all U.S. locations in 2020. Tuesday Morning, which shuttered its Louisiana stores in 2023 after a bankruptcy filing. Dirt Cheap, which closed its nine Louisiana locations, including Lafayette, in late 2024. These were not beloved institutions in the way Brother’s or Café Vermilionville were, but each one served a shopping need that didn’t simply migrate somewhere else when the doors closed.

One That Made It Back

BJ’s Pizza House closed in June 2023 after more than 40 years on Congress Street. Lafayette noticed. People drove in from across Acadiana to wait in line through a Louisiana summer for one last Full House pizza.

Then something happened that almost never happens. A group of local investors acquired the business, put it through a wall-to-wall renovation — its first major update in 25 years — and reopened BJ’s in January 2024 with every original recipe intact. The wooden booths, carved with decades of customer names, stayed. Kamal Borchalli, who had run BJ’s for more than 30 years before the closure, showed up as the first guest at the reopening. The new ownership added table service and a full bar without dismantling what made the place worth saving.

That outcome is unusual. Most of the places on this list did not get a second chance, and the ones that didn’t are simply gone.

Lafayette has plenty of places to eat, shop, and spend money. The food culture here is as strong as anywhere in Louisiana, and new businesses open regularly. But there is a real difference between what fills a commercial space and what fills the space a community institution leaves behind. The places on this list were part of how Acadiana families organized their lives, and when they closed, something specific went with them.

The next time a local institution announces it’s struggling, that’s worth remembering.

You May Also Like...

Historic Lafayette Photos You've Probably Never Seen

Gallery Credit: TSM Lafayette

Source: Stores and Restaurants Lafayette Lost — and Still Misses

Categories: Lafayette News