Mid-City Market

401 North Carrollton Avenue | New Orleans, Louisiana

The What And The Why

Mid-City Market is the transformational redevelopment of a formerly blighted prominent New Orleans property into a contextual 109,000 square-foot, grocery-anchored urban infill shopping center. Located at the corner of North Carrollton Avenue and Bienville Street, the 6.5 acre site sat vacant prior to Stirling Properties’ $31 million investment in an adaptive reuse of the property into a flagship Winn-Dixie grocery-anchored neighborhood center.

Our Challenge

Being located in a culturally rich urban neighborhood with an extensive architectural history, Mid-City Market presented numerous strategic design and coordination challenges.  Furthermore, the project is situated adjacent to the proposed Lafitte Greenway, a 3.1 mile linear pedestrian and bicycle park which will run from the French Quarter to the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans. To have a successful project, our design had to provide for visibility, access and parking that is so highly coveted by today’s retailers, while at the same time complementing the Lafitte Greenway as well as the architectural and cultural fabric of the neighborhood.  Additionally, development challenges in the City of New Orleans are tremendous from the entitlement and permitting stage through inspection and construction.  The City of New Orleans provides a tremendous opportunity to be a part of a unique cultural fabric, while at the same time it presents challenges of working with an aging infrastructure.

Our Strategy

In order to create the most responsible contextual development we could, Stirling hired Mid-City architecture firm VergesRome Architects to design Mid-City Market.  Through coordinating extensively with numerous neighborhood groups and community stakeholders, Stirling and VergesRome arrived at a design centered on Carrollton Avenue that also makes the Lafitte Greenway the lifeblood of the project that connects with the neighborhood setting.

Our Results

Since Hurricane Katrina, the redevelopment of Mid-City Market has been lauded as one of the most important private projects to happen in the City of New Orleans.  Formerly an abandoned car dealership and strip center, the site was one of the only remaining vacant and blighted properties in the vibrant Carrollton Avenue commercial corridor.  Working with Winn-Dixie as an anchor tenant, our first-class center also includes: Office Depot, Verizon Wireless, Jefferson Feed Pet & Garden Center, Pei Wei Asian Diner, Panera Bread, Pizza Hut, Ochsner Urgent Care Clinic, Five Guys Burgers and Fries, Felipe’s Taqueria, GNC, Pinkberry, and LA Nails Spa.  Our Stirling Properties team remained adaptive in order to execute a strategic and original vision for the complex, adaptive redevelopment.