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.
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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…