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.”