The boulevard was named Stalinallee between 1949 and 1961 (previously Große Frankfurter Straße), and was a flagship building project of East Germany's reconstruction programme after World War II.

It was designed by the architects Hermann Henselmann, Hartmann, Hopp, Leucht, Paulick, and Souradny to contain spacious and luxurious apartments for workers, as well as shops, restaurants, cafés, a tourist hotel, and an enormous cinema, the Kino International.

The avenue, which is 90 metres (300 ft) wide[2][3] and 2.3 kilometres (1.4 mi) long,[2] is lined with monumental eight-story buildings designed in the wedding-cake style, the socialist classicism of the Soviet Union.

[citation needed] A monumental Stalin statue presented to the East German government by a Komsomol delegation on the occasion of the Third World Festival of Youth and Students was formally dedicated on 3 August 1951 after being temporarily placed at a location on the newly designed and impressive boulevard.

[citation needed] Later the street was used for East Germany's annual May Day parade, featuring thousands of soldiers along with tanks and other military vehicles to showcase the power and the glory of the communist government.

After a letter written to the Berliner Zeitung questioned whether the term "Stalin's bathroom" had actually been in common use during the GDR period,[10] Andreas Kopietz, a journalist at the newspaper, published an article admitting he had invented the phrase and identifying himself as the original anonymous Wikipedia editor, allowing the record to be set straight.