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In Their Words: Stories of Minnesota's Greatest Generation

For millions of Americans the end of World War II brought a time of new opportunity and unprecedented prosperity. Housing developers reveled in the need for new housing and jumped at the chance to build acres and acres of tract homes - modest, homogenous little "crackerboxes" with basic amenities - and bought up land in the areas surrounding the Twin Cities and other communities in Minnesota. Families in search of the American Dream migrated in droves from the cities to the rapidly expanding suburbs in search of a better life: a home of their own, a better place to raise their families, and room to breathe.

Richfield, a first-ring suburb just south of Minneapolis, was the fastest growing of all Twin Cities suburbs, with a 363% increase in population from 1940 to 1950. Like the new tract homes, residents in the 1940s and 1950s were pretty homogenous. Almost exclusively white, the population consisted of mostly young families with children, with primary occupations in construction, manufacturing and trade. By 1954 Richfield had become the fifth largest town in Minnesota with a population of 31,756. The metropolitan suburbs of St. Louis Park, Bloomington, Roseville, and West St. Paul also experienced very rapid expansion during the post-war building boom.

As the suburbs grew, demand for village services, better roads, and other amenities became greater. Schools were built in record numbers in anticipation of the influx of students of the "baby boom" generation, as well as churches and synagogues, medical facilities, shopping centers, swimming pools, sports facilites, golf courses, parks, and other conveniences that would contribute to the quality of suburban life. Neighbors felt a real sense of community, often socializing with one another's families and sharing responsibility for watching neighborhood children.

Such rapid growth brought with it unique growing pains. Post-war suburbanites used to city life found themselves temporarily living next door to farms. They lived and commuted to work on unpaved roads, and endured the construction of the freeway system. Residents tooks sides in debates over village water and sewer construction issues.

The national trend toward consumerism was reflected in the number of neighborhood shopping centers that were built in the 1950s, which provided convenient places for suburban families to shop. Most centers boasted a Red Owl or National Tea grocery store and a department store as anchors, with a hardware store, drugstore, and other practical shops in between. When Southdale Center, the first fully enclosed shopping center in the United States, opened in Edina in 1956 with its 72 stores, it ushered in a new trend in convenient, one-stop suburban shopping.

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