For years, Slidell officials have grappled with calls from constituents to revitalize the largely empty North Shore Square Mall.
On Thursday, news broke that a well-known St. Tammany Parish grocery operator, Acquistapace’s, has purchased two of the former anchor sites in the mall.
Adam Acquistapace, a member of the family that owns and operates the company, declined to release details, but he said one of the stores would operate under Acquistapace’s banner.
He declined to say how much the company paid for the mall spots, which formerly housed Conn’s Home Plus and JCPenney stores. The mall is owned by Morguard, a company based in Canada that manages billions of dollars in real estate across North America.
“We’ve been working on this project for about two years,” he said. “We were eyeing up the Northshore (Boulevard) corridor for a while.”
Acquistapace was on stage with Slidell Mayor Randy Fandal, who broke the news during his “State of Slidell” speech before the East St. Tammany Business Association.
“Slidell is open for business,” Fandal said, later adding that the Acquistapace development might come on line by year’s end.
Later, Acquistapace was reluctant to give a timeframe but said the company is working as quickly as it can.
Acquistapace’s currently operates a grocery store in downtown Covington, and smaller, specialty stores in Mandeville and Slidell. The stores are popular for their large selection of cheeses, wines and liquor, in addition to run-of-the-mill groceries.
Once a regional shopping hub and economic force in eastern St. Tammany, the mall has faced an exodus of stores over the past decade and a half. It currently has only two open stores: the popular Dillard’s clearance center and At Home, a chain that recently filed for bankruptcy last year.
City officials had tried to find ways to revitalize the mall site, hearing from constituents who wanted something done with the largely empty, 621,000-square-foot space in a high-profile location off Interstate 12 at Northshore Boulevard. The Northshore Square Economic Development District last year partnered with the St. Tammany Economic Development Corporation on a study to try and determine the best way to redevelop the mall.
Fandal said the top two best uses, according to the study, are an event space or a distribution facility.
Toward the end of last summer it appeared that the city was actually moving toward a purchase of the mall, with the City Council adopting a new sales tax for some of the area surrounding the mall on Northshore Boulevard to provide revenue to cover the purchase and also authorizing interim Mayor Bill Borchert to sign a letter of intent exploring a mall purchase by the city.
Borchert at the time said Morguard initially sought more than $50 million for the roughly 50-acre site but the sides had come down to around $13 million.
But Borchert and the city reversed course last September when news came out that Morguard had already agreed to sell two of the vacant anchor stores to another company, which at the time city officials would only describe as a St. Tammany Parish company seeking to expand its footprint.
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