The Mall Was Invented by War

How Hitler, highways, and consumerism gave us food courts and climate-controlled futures

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You’re standing in a shopping mall.
Maybe there’s a Cinnabon. A pretzel place. A kid crying in a kiosk.
It all feels so… normal.

But the mall?
It was a response to tanks.
And it exists because of Hitler.

Let’s rewind.

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🛻 It Starts With a Highway

During World War II, the U.S. military realized it couldn’t move troops across the country quickly. American roads were awful—cracked, narrow, slow.

Germany had something better: the Autobahn.

After the war, President Eisenhower, who’d admired German infrastructure, pushed for a U.S. version. In 1956, he signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, creating 41,000 miles of interstate freeways.

It was military policy disguised as public works.
A defense network.
But it reshaped everything.

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🏘 The Suburbs Explode

The new highways made it possible to live far from where you worked.
So Americans did.

Developers built Levittowns: endless rows of affordable homes outside cities. And suddenly, there were millions of people in places with no walkable main street, no town square…

No shopping district.

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🏬 Enter the Mall

Also in 1956, just outside Minneapolis in Edina, Minnesota, an Austrian architect named Victor Gruen opened the first modern enclosed shopping mall: Southdale Center.

It had a fountain. A birdcage. Air conditioning.
It wasn’t just a place to shop—it was a climate-controlled civic fantasy for the suburban age.

Gruen wanted it to include libraries, apartments, even parks.
But developers wanted retail and parking.

And retail and parking won.

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🇺🇸 Shopping as Ideology

In the Cold War, malls became a weapon of soft power.
The Soviets had ration books.
America had escalators and food courts.

Capitalism wasn’t just about production—it was about abundance on display.

You didn’t just buy pants.
You bought into a system.

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🛍 Minnesota’s Mega-Monument

In 1992, Minnesota doubled down on this idea—with the opening of the Mall of America.
The biggest mall in the U.S.
Amusement park. Aquarium. Four floors of consumer spectacle.

It wasn’t just a place to shop—it was a destination, a tourist attraction, a symbolic heir to both the Cold War mall boom and the military-infrastructure roots of the Interstate era.

And like Southdale, it sat right next to a highway.

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📉 The Fall of the Mall

But then… came the internet.

From the mid-2000s on, online shopping began gutting brick-and-mortar retail.
First books. Then clothes. Then everything.

Thousands of malls closed. Others hollowed out.

By 2020, one in four malls in America was predicted to shut down within a few years.
Anchor stores like Sears and JCPenney vanished. Parking lots grew weeds.

And in their place?

New uses.

• Old malls became fulfillment centers for Amazon.

• Others turned into apartments, churches, even public schools.

• Some, like parts of the Mall of America, rebranded as entertainment complexes, hosting esports, aquariums, and Instagrammable experiences—selling moments, not merchandise.

What started as a Cold War battlefield of consumption became… something stranger. A post-retail landscape haunted by its own optimism.

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🧭 Development in a Shopping Bag

So the next time you’re wandering through a mall—or where a mall used to be—remember this:

It’s not just about buying stuff.

It’s about:

• Military fears turned into highways,

• Highways turned into suburbs,

• Suburbs turned into malls,

• And malls turned into a vision of development that marketed freedom in 30,000 square feet.

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Because sometimes, the most powerful weapon in a global struggle isn’t a missile…
it’s a sale at The Gap.