THE URBAN RENEWER: JAMES W. ROUSE (1914-1996)

Nobody really believes in the American city,” developer James Rouse once lamented. “We have lived so long with old, worn-out, ugly places that we have become anesthetized to their condition.” Rouse, to be sure, was a believer. After pioneering the suburban shopping mall, he came up with a revolutionary idea to lure people away from it. His strategy was to revitalize the decaying inner city his developments had helped denude–not with a gleaming, modernist makeover but by restoring original buildings and bustling public spaces. Rouse’s “festival marketplaces” like Faneuil Hall in Boston and Harborplace in Baltimore, Maryland, not only brought shoppers (and tourists) back downtown but also reimagined the town-center social dynamism that attracted people to cities in the first place.

Unfortunately, Rouse’s vision was so influential that it eventually took on an anesthetizing quality of its own. The restored warehouses, quaint specialty shops, cookie stations and sidewalk jugglers came to seem as artificial and cliched as the suburban malls they were intended to compete with. But Rouse, who died last week at 81, wrought more changes and brought more hope to the American city than any builder of his era.

He grew up in a small town on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, the youngest of five children of a prosperous canned-goods broker. When he was 16, both parents died within six months of each other, leaving the family broke and its house repossessed. Rouse parked cars to make money and eventually got a law degree by taking classes at night. At age 25, he and a friend borrowed $20,000 to form a mortgage-banking firm that became the Rouse Co., one of the nation’s biggest developers of houses, apartments and shopping centers.

Rouse built one of the first enclosed shopping malls, in Glen Burnie, Maryland, in 1958 (he is even credited with first calling them “malls”). But he soon grew disenchanted with suburban sprawl and the unplanned chaos of most cities–“formless places without order, beauty or reason, with no visible respect for either people or the land.” His solution was the planned city of Columbia, Maryland, built on 14,000 acres of farmland he had acquired. Instead of impersonal malls and isolated housing developments, the town (current population 84,000) has nine village centers, 78 miles of foot and bike paths and three lakes. But for Rouse, an advocate of integration and open housing, Columbia’s finest achievement was its racially mixed population living in harmony. “Racial problems,” he said, “can only be solved in the cities.”

Rouse, who lived with his second wife in a lakeside house in Columbia, next turned to the aging inner city for a new and profitable crusade. In Boston he took over three run-down 150-year-old buildings and turned them into a lively complex of offices, retail shops, food stalls and restaurants. Within four years of its opening in 1976, Faneuil Hall was drawing 15 million visitors annually. It inspired Rouse to try a similar restoration job at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Harborplace, which opened in 1980, had its detractors (a critic called it “Atlantic City’s boardwalk with a touch of Disneyland”), but it helped revitalize Baltimore’s downtown and secured Rouse’s place as the most influential urban developer of his time.

New York City’s South Street Seaport, St. Louis Station and other similar developments followed. Not all were successful: Rouse projects in smaller cities like Toledo, Ohio, and Richmond, Virginia, were financial flops, proving that street jugglers and candle shops cannot solve every city’s economic woes. By that time, however, Rouse had retired from active management of his company and formed the Enterprise Foundation, which has financed 61,000 homes for the poor since 1981 and worked on solving inner-city problems like joblessness and drugs. Profit, he insisted, should never be the primary motive for a developer: “What should be important is to produce something of benefit to mankind. If that happens, then the profit will be there.” Rouse was one master builder whose idealism, like his ideas, never flagged.