More than 20 years ago, Time magazine famously proclaimed on its cover that “Malls are dead.”
Nobody bothered to tell Lakeside Shopping Center, the 65-year-old superregional mall in Metairie that sits on some of the most valuable commercial land in Louisiana.
While two decades of e-commerce and changing consumer habits have shuttered big-box and department stores and the many shopping centers they once anchored, Lakeside has defied the odds, continuing to grow, adding ever more high-end retailers and posting year-over-year sales increases.
Five new tenants have recently opened or announced plans to open in Lakeside later this year, including Aritzia, Clarks, Coach, Gorjana and Chicken Salad Chick. That’s on top of the new stores that opened in 2025 — Anthropologie, Vuori, Rowan, Garage and Alo Yoga.
“We are creating a retail destination,” said Tricia Philpott, Lakeside’s longtime regional director of leasing. “Retailers used to come to town to open three locations. Now, they’re looking to open one and it’s at Lakeside.”
Experts attribute Lakeside’s success to several factors. One is its prime location at the intersection of Causeway and Veterans boulevards, which is busy, prosperous and convenient to shoppers from Orleans, Jefferson and St. Tammany parishes and beyond.
Data shows the mall draws from a 60-mile radius that extends from Baton Rouge to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and from the northern tip of Tangipahoa Parish to the bayou region.
Another is the retail savvy of its longtime owners — New York-based Feil Co. The family-owned firm — still chaired by Jeffrey Feil, who bought Lakeside out of a foreclosure sale with his father in 1968 — has continued to reinvest in the property over the years, most recently with a $20 million renovation in 2019.
Those upgrades, which added natural light, raised ceiling heights inside individual stores and allowed tenants to custom-build their storefronts, have made it easier to respond to changing consumer preferences and attract trendy and higher-end tenants, which, in turn, attracts more shoppers.
External factors are also at play. Studies show that Gen Z shoppers are rediscovering malls as part of a broader shift away from so much screen time. In a recent study by Ipsos Consumer Tracker, nearly 60% of shoppers ages 18-34 said they shop at malls often — twice the rate of adults over 55, The New York Times recently reported.
“The pendulum is starting to swing back a little,” said Ryan Pecot, senior retail leasing and development adviser with Stirling. “There’s still hope for in-person retail.”
‘Christmas at Lakeside every day’
The hope does not extend to all malls, or even most of them. Half the nation’s malls have shut down since the 1980s, and another 40 or so, on average, close each year, according to CapitalOne Shopper, which tracks retail data. By the end of the decade, as many as 87% of the roughly 1,200 malls still in business could be shuttered, the study estimates.
At the same time, a fraction of high-end malls is thriving. The top 100 malls in the country account for half the entire sector’s value, The New York Times reported, while the bottom 350 make up 10%.
Lakeside is among the fraction of successes. It ranks among the top 15% of the country’s 600 superregional malls based on the number of visits per square foot, according to national tracking data provided by Lakeside. The statistic is a key performance metric that measures how efficiently a property drives traffic relative to its size.
Superregional malls are those of at least 1 million square feet with anchors, a mix of high-end tenants and shoppers who come from at least a 25-mile radius.
Lakeside also outperforms other top malls in both occupancy and revenue growth. Its vacancy rate is around 1%, compared with 5% for the top 100 class A malls around the country, and its sales have increased nearly 7% a year over the past three years, compared with 5% nationwide.
“It’s Christmas at Lakeside every day,” said Kirsten Early, a longtime local retail expert and principal at SRSA. “They are best in class, hands down.”
Success begets success
Early and other observers say that besides the inherent advantages of its location and the retail know-how of its ownership, the Feils, the mall’s management has done a good job attracting trendy new tenants from outside the market, like Alo Yoga, a Beverly Hills brand that opened its first Louisiana location in Lakeside last year, and Aritzia, a fashionable Canadian label opening this spring.
The mall also has been effective in attracting retail tenants away from other shopping centers in the local market. Arhaus, a high-end furniture store, left the South Market District for Lakeside in 2023. Anthropologie vacated its two-story location in Canal Place, where it was an anchor tenant, for Lakeside in 2025.
Athleisurewear powerhouse Lululemon, which originally opened three locations in the New Orleans market — Magazine Street, Canal Place and Lakeside — has since closed the Uptown store and doubled the size of its Lakeside store.
Experts say negotiating with retail tenants and placing them in a mall in a location that works for them and benefits the overall mix of the center is both an art and a science that Philpott, Lakeside’s leasing director, has mastered.
She compares it with a puzzle with a lot of constantly moving pieces.
Lakeside also closely tracks store performance and sales. Management won’t disclose average lease rates, though the numbers likely vary widely from tenant to tenant, depending on the deal. But it will move an underperforming tenant to a less visible location or terminate a lease if that is an option.
“Sales are a key metric in this business, and customers vote with their wallets,” Philpott said. “If a store is not performing sometimes, it’s not the right time or the right fit.”
Experts say whatever formula Lakeside has landed on, it works and in the world of malls, success begets success.
“Once a mall is busy, it stays busy,” Pecot said. “That energy feeds on itself. People want to be a part of it.”
Broader trends still against malls
On the flip side, once a mall starts dying, it doesn’t take much to push it over the edge. When Cortana Mall in Baton Rouge began losing its anchor tenants a decade ago, they fell like dominoes, causing smaller retailers to shut down. The mall has since been torn down and is now the site of an Amazon distribution center.
The Mall of Acadiana in Lafayette is dealing with an exodus of its anchors. Macy’s recently announced it will close, joining Sears. Only JCPenney and Dillard’s remain. In 2020, JCPenney announced plans to close the Acadiana Mall location but reversed its stance a month later.
“Geographically, it is still well-located,” said Pecot, who is based in Lafayette. “But the anchors have closed, so the smaller stores have started to close. I think you will see further deterioration.”
The Mall of Louisiana in Baton Rouge, which also fits the definition of a superregional mall given its size and tenant mix, is holding its own, market watchers say. Though it does not have as many high-end retailers as Lakeside, it has backfilled vacancies in recent years with “experiential”-style tenants — like the Blue Zoo Aquarium and Main Event family entertainment space — that have kept people coming to the mall and filling up space.
“That’s important,” Pecot said. “People don’t feel safe and don’t enjoy being in an empty mall. They like being around other people.”
Jonathan Walker, a commercial broker with Maestri Murrell in Baton Rouge, said while there are a handful of bright spots in the mall landscape, he believes the broader trends away from malls will continue.
“Louisiana is a little unique in that people still like traditional shopping methods,” he said. “But that national outlook for malls is not that positive.”
