Saturdays in high school, if I wasn’t getting wasted on Coors Light in a friend’s basement, I was at the mall. It was the largest in my state (Pennsylvania) and the third-largest in the nation: 2.7 million square feet of retail, two food courts, seven department stores, 40-plus restaurants, a brewery, majestically arcing skylights, and a 30-foot-tall fountain lined with marble. It was always 70 degrees, the tiled floor was always immaculate, and it was never empty.

I don’t remember buying much — buying stuff wasn’t the point. The point of being at the mall was: to wear a hoodie, feel vaguely rich and aristocratic (marble floors, gushing fountains), and to smell the horny perfume they piped into Hollister.

One man designed basically every mall in America. He was born in Vienna and fled to New York with “eight dollars and no English,” in his words, after the Nazis invaded. He had a degree in architecture and a background designing theatrical stage sets, and he was contracted by the department store Dayton’s (which would become Target) to build a shopping district around its next location near Minneapolis.

Instead, Victor Gruen designed a city.

Early plans for that first mall featured homes, schools, hospitals, a manmade lake, a supermarket, a bakery, and a florist. Gruen, a lifelong socialist, thought malls could cure American suburbs of what he perceived to be wrong with them: everyone was lonely all the time. He wrapped his malls in windowless walls because (a) he wanted us to forget our cars, (b) he thought outdoor malls were ugly, and (c) inside the enclosed space, he could manipulate every detail — lighting, temperature, entrances and exits — to move people toward its center, which he dubbed “The Garden Court of Perpetual Spring.”

In the Garden Court of Perpetual Spring, time stopped. No one cared if it was winter or spring: the eucalyptus trees still towered over the plaza, the flowers bloomed in oversize planters, and it was always 75 degrees. In the Garden Court of Perpetual Spring, everyone lived happily together, one nation under capitalism. It was a fake world, but a benevolent one, and if it feels vaguely Disneyland-ish to you, that’s because Gruen’s plan for early malls inspired Walt Disney’s vision for EPCOT (the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). They both wanted car-free utopias, and EPCOT, too, was initially supposed to include homes.

(Interesting, actually, that both men wanted to build cities, but their partners — Disney and Dayton, respectively — pivoted away from those visions, possibly out of fear.)

While he may not have articulated it this way, I think Gruen was trying to solve a core tension within American life: freedom must be balanced by some semblance of shared reality. Capitalism works when we can experience its benefits together, physically, wandering a cave of wonders lined with everything we can buy with our (parents’) hard-earned cash.

“Sometimes self-interest has remarkable spiritual consequences” is one of my favorite Victor Gruen quotes. Also: “It’s the merchants who will save our urban civilization.”

Years after Gruen designed that first mall in Minnesota, Congress amended the tax laws governing depreciation, so you could build a mall for, say, $20 million, and write off most of its value in “depreciated real estate.” This meant some developers could generate “losses” (on paper) to offset income from investors, earning a net profit even if the mall itself wasn’t profitable.

Construction boomed. By the 80s, developers had built upwards of 1,000 malls, at which point Congress changed the tax law governing depreciation again, and malls became financially toxic.

And then… they “died.”

In 2017, when my day job was curating blog posts for a startup media company, one trend was to share bleak, apocalyptic, black-and-white photos of “dead malls.” Time and The Atlantic sent professional photographers into abandoned Rust Belt malls, where they’d take eerie photos of escalators strewn with debris. A few years ago, VICE sent a videographer into a suburban Cleveland “ghost mall,” where the first shot, in typical VICE fashion, is someone tapping on what looks like a human scalp submerged in a Gruen-inspired fountain. Basically, the rise in reflexive anticapitalism coincided with a trend where it was cool to dunk on malls.

Two years ago, a high-school student fell through the roof of the abandoned Century III Mall outside of Pittsburgh. His name was Cam, and based on everything I can gather, he was probably filming a gonzo “dead mall” video, the type popularized by “urban explorer” Dan Bell in the mid-2010s. Hallmarks of the genre include busted-out fluorescent lights, naked mannequins, and mold.

Malls proliferated too quickly, obviously, and Gruen hated what they’d become. “I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments,” he said in 1970, lamenting the fact that developers had strayed from his vision: cities.

So American Malls are actually very weird: imaginative, utopic community centers designed by a socialist to cure a capitalist country of (what he perceived as) soullessness and ugliness, after he’d fled fascism to move here.

And they definitely still exist, but no one cares. People don’t feel alive at the mall like they used to. (Malls peaked per capita in 2009 and have been declining since then; culturally, they hit hardest in the 80s and early 90s.) A friend of mine who turned 18 in 1988 told me, when I mentioned that I was writing this: “The best days of my life were at the mall.” She kind of choked up while she was saying it.

My parents were part of the Peak Mall generation, actually, I’m realizing now. They were in their 30s (my age) in the 80s. When I was a kid, we’d drive to the mall on Saturdays almost like it was our religion — my parents revered it, you could tell, and my mom dressed up slightly to go. Sometimes they’d lowkey rage with friends at a restaurant on the first floor, leaving me to wander the halls alone (dangerous, brave) or just to sit in Waldenbooks reading the Guinness Book of World Records.

It felt like the center of the universe… but it was just the mall.

People need imaginative, beautiful places to exist, with each other, in public. We need more Garden Courts of Perpetual Spring. What Gruen did, on a core level, was worldbuilding. He created a universe where life was fundamentally pleasant, and beautiful, with majestic fountains and ornate statues and arcing skylights. Millions of years from now, when an alien civilization discovers the ruins of America, they’ll probably wonder what went down in these marble halls. I wouldn’t be surprised if they think they were temples, sites for sacred rituals and ceremonies, the pinnacle of our civilization — and in a way we barely realized while we were living through it, they kind of were.

—Harris Sockel