JAMES ROUSE
James Wilson Rouse (April 26, 1914 - April 9, 1996) was a pioneering American
real estate developer, civic activist, and later, free enterprise-based
philanthropist.
He was born in Easton, Maryland. He attended college and law school during the
Great Depression; after graduating in 1937 he worked for the Federal Housing
Administration and in 1939 he was a partner at a mortgage banking firm called
the "Moss-Rouse Company", which would eventually become the Rouse Company.
After World War II he became involved in Baltimore, Maryland's efforts to
rehabilitate its slums. This led to his participation in Dwight D. Eisenhower's
National Housing Task Force starting in 1953. He introduced (or at least helped
popularize) the term "urban renewal" to describe the series of recommendations
made by that task force.
In 1958, Rouse built Harundale Mall in Glen Burnie, Maryland, the first enclosed
shopping center east of the Mississippi River. His company coined the term "mall"
to describe the development, which was an alternative to the more typical strip
malls usually built in the suburbs. Although in retrospect, many attribute the
rise of the shopping mall as a major contributor to the decline of the city
downtown core, Rouse's focus at the time was on the introduction of malls as a
form of town center for the suburbs.
In the 1960s Rouse turned his focus on planned communities. The first was the
Village of Cross Keys. On June 16, 1961, Rouse bought 68 acres inside the city
of Baltimore from the Baltimore Country Club—at $25,000 an acre. Rouse excitedly
proclaimed that the new development will be the largest, and potentially most
important development in the history of Baltimore. According to Paul Marx in
Jim Rouse: Capitalist/Idealist, Rouse hoped he could bring to the residential
field some of the fresh thinking, good taste and high standards which we
believe have marked our shopping center developments.
Familiar with bad housing in Baltimore and Washington, Rouse now had an
opportunity to demonstrate what housing within a city's borders could be like. There
is a real need for residential development, he said, in which there is a
strong sense of community; a need to feed into the city some of the atmosphere
and pace of the small town and village; a need to create a community which can
meet as many as possible of the needs of the people who live there; which can
bring these people into natural contact with one another; which can produce out
of these relationships a spirit and feeling of neighborliness and a rich sense
of belonging to a community. In a city that practiced strict racial segregation,
Rouse intended Cross Keys to be open to all African Americans who could afford
to live there. Rouse's first planned community was a careful mixture of
townhouses, garden apartments, a mid-rise apartment house, stores in the village
square, and an office complex. By 1970, the Village of Cross Keys had become
among the most desirable places to live in the Baltimore area. While Cross Keys
was under construction, Rouse decided to build a whole new city. The creation of
Columbia, between Baltimore and Washington, was the greatest adventure of Jim
Rouse's life. Columbia was the ultimate opportunity: the chance to embody his
ideals in a whole new city.
Paul Marx tells the story of how this huge project came to be financed. Rouse
turned to his partner in previous projects, the Connecticut General Life
Insurance Company. At a meeting at company headquarters in Hartford. Rouse made
his pitch to CG's top real estate and mortgage people and the company's chairman
of the board, Frazar B. Wilde. The questioning was mostly negative, until Mr.
Wilde joined in. He expressed the view that CG couldn't lose. The land that
would be invested in not only would retain its value but would be worth more
with every passing year. For if Rouse's project didn't pan out, the land could
always be sold for a better price than what it cost.
The plan that was arrived at was for the land for the new city to be owned by a
subsidiary called Howard Research and Development Corporation. CG would own half
of that corporation and Rouse's Community Research and Development the other
half. CRD would be responsible for the management of the acquired land and for
preparing a master plan for development. CG also put up some of the money for
Columbia's infrastructure. The rest was supplied by Teachers Insurance and
Annuity Association and the Chase Manhattan Bank.
By the end of the summer of 1963 close to 14,000 acres (57 km²) Of Howard County
farmland had been acquired, and the time was at hand to begin planning what to
do with it. Rouse wanted to hear from a wide assortment of experts and scholars.
He brought together the Work Group, consisting of top people in health, family
life, education, recreation, government, transportation, and employment.
Ultimately emerging was the idea that the new city should be a real multi-faceted
city, not a bedroom suburb. It should be possible for its residents to find
everything they needed right there jobs, education, recreation, health care, and
any other necessity.
What would be the component parts of this city? How should it be divided? What
was the ideal size for the core component that would provide most of the
essentials for the optimal growth of human beings? According to Paul Marx, Rouse
was not reluctant to bring up his home town of Easton as the kind of place that
provided the best nourishment of the human spirit. Consensus formed around the
idea that the basic subdivision within the new city should be the village, a
unit of from 10,000-15,000 people. This number was thought to be the most likely
to foster a local feeling of identification: for merchants to get to know their
customers, ministers their memberships, and teachers their pupils and parents.
Within the city, there would be 12 villages, each to be like Rouse's Easton.
Each village would be a central place where people of different income levels
and types of housing would cross paths and mix. Each village would have most of
the services and resources usually found in an American small town. It would
have a middle school and a high school, a teen center, a supermarket, a library,
a hospital, an auditorium, offices, restaurants, some specialty shops, and a few
larger recreational facilities. It also would have a multi-denominational house
of worship. The hope was that one building would be used by several
religions. Marx says that Rouse wanted to defuse competition among different
religions and sects, reducing if not eliminating totally, the pursuit of
prestigious land, buildings, and the monetary wherewithal.
In addition to the villages there would be The Town Center. This would be the
new city's downtown. In it would be the central office of the city's governing
body, the Columbia Association. Here would be the main cluster of retail stores
(as part of the inevitable mall), a hotel and conference center, a hospital,
movie theaters and a concert hall, a community college, and branches of the
Maryland Institute of Art and the Peabody Conservatory of Music.
The main entertainment area was to be known as Tivoli, after the entertainment
area in Copenhagen. Early on Rouse said that he hoped Tivoli would be a place where,
under the benign influence of having fun and relaxing in familiar ways, people
would have opportunities, especially attractively and conveniently presented,
for discovering new ways to enjoy their free time new foods, new visual and
tactile aesthetic experiences, even new social relations. According to Marx,
Rouse's vision for downtown Columbia grew ever-more grandiose. Rouse wanted The
Town Center in Columbia to provide the most comprehensive range of recreational
activities and services that had ever been contemplated in a new town center.
Rouse again and again reminded his staff that Columbia would be “at the center
of a population of 4.5 million people growing to 6 million; that we are near by
one of the greatest tourist attractions in the United Statesmthe nation's
capital By 2008, however, Downtown Columbia had not yet become a regular stop
for tourists, as Rouse had hoped it would. A curious few come but not hordes.
Statues of James W. Rouse (right) and his brother, Willard, in Columbia,
Maryland by artist William F. Duffy. Willard RouseIII, Willard's son (James's
nephew), was another notable real estate developer. Photo taken by Jeff Kubina.
Starting in the mid-1970s and continuing into the 1980s he shifted focus to what
he ended up calling the "festival marketplace"; of which the Faneuil Hall
Marketplace was the first and most successful example. Completed in 1976, the
Faneuil Hall Marketplace ( comprising Quincy Market and other spaces adjacent to
Boston's Faneuil Hall) was designed by architect Benjamin C. Thompson, and was a
financial success, an act of historic preservation, and an anchor for urban
revitalization. However, at its inception, it was considered a highly risky
venture, and many critics felt it was doomed to fail. Rouse's innovative
business vision looked obvious in retrospect, but it was a bold contrarian move
with few friends at the outset.
Other examples of Rouse Company developments include South Street Seaport in New
York City, Market East in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Harborplace in Baltimore,
Maryland, Waterside in Norfolk, Virginia, St. Louis Union Station in St. Louis,
Missouri, Downtown Portland's Pioneer Place , and the Riverwalk of New
Orleans. This focus led TIME magazine to call him "the man who made cities fun
again."
After forty years at the Rouse Company, he retired in 1979. Soon afterwards, he
and his wife founded the Enterprise Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation
funded in part by a for-profit subsidiary, The Enterprise Community Partners,
Inc., and focused on seeding partnerships with community developers that address
the need for affordable housing and associated social services for poor
neighborhoods.
Through his daughter Robin, he is the grandfather of actor Edward Norton.
The Rouse Theatre in Wilde Lake High School is named after James. In May 2006,
an approximately four-mile stretch of Maryland Route 175 between Interstate 95
and U.S. Route 29 in Columbia, Maryland, was named after Rouse and his wife,
Patty.
He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995.
James Wilson Rouse (April 26, 1914 - April 9, 1996) was a pioneering American
real estate developer, civic activist, and later, free enterprise-based
philanthropist.
He was born in Easton, Maryland. He attended college and law school during the
Great Depression; after graduating in 1937 he worked for the Federal Housing
Administration and in 1939 he was a partner at a mortgage banking firm called
the "Moss-Rouse Company", which would eventually become the Rouse Company.
After World War II he became involved in Baltimore, Maryland's efforts to
rehabilitate its slums. This led to his participation in Dwight D. Eisenhower's
National Housing Task Force starting in 1953. He introduced (or at least helped
popularize) the term "urban renewal" to describe the series of recommendations
made by that task force.
In 1958, Rouse built Harundale Mall in Glen Burnie, Maryland, the first enclosed
shopping center east of the Mississippi River. His company coined the term "mall"
to describe the development, which was an alternative to the more typical strip
malls usually built in the suburbs. Although in retrospect, many attribute the
rise of the shopping mall as a major contributor to the decline of the city
downtown core, Rouse's focus at the time was on the introduction of malls as a
form of town center for the suburbs.
In the 1960s Rouse turned his focus on planned communities. The first was the
Village of Cross Keys. On June 16, 1961, Rouse bought 68 acres inside the city
of Baltimore from the Baltimore Country Club—at $25,000 an acre. Rouse excitedly
proclaimed that the new development will be the largest, and potentially most
important development in the history of Baltimore. According to Paul Marx in
Jim Rouse: Capitalist/Idealist, Rouse hoped he could bring to the residential
field some of the fresh thinking, good taste and high standards which we
believe have marked our shopping center developments.
Familiar with bad housing in Baltimore and Washington, Rouse now had an
opportunity to demonstrate what housing within a city's borders could be like. There
is a real need for residential development, he said, in which there is a
strong sense of community; a need to feed into the city some of the atmosphere
and pace of the small town and village; a need to create a community which can
meet as many as possible of the needs of the people who live there; which can
bring these people into natural contact with one another; which can produce out
of these relationships a spirit and feeling of neighborliness and a rich sense
of belonging to a community. In a city that practiced strict racial segregation,
Rouse intended Cross Keys to be open to all African Americans who could afford
to live there. Rouse's first planned community was a careful mixture of
townhouses, garden apartments, a mid-rise apartment house, stores in the village
square, and an office complex. By 1970, the Village of Cross Keys had become
among the most desirable places to live in the Baltimore area. While Cross Keys
was under construction, Rouse decided to build a whole new city. The creation of
Columbia, between Baltimore and Washington, was the greatest adventure of Jim
Rouse's life. Columbia was the ultimate opportunity: the chance to embody his
ideals in a whole new city.
Paul Marx tells the story of how this huge project came to be financed. Rouse
turned to his partner in previous projects, the Connecticut General Life
Insurance Company. At a meeting at company headquarters in Hartford. Rouse made
his pitch to CG's top real estate and mortgage people and the company's chairman
of the board, Frazar B. Wilde. The questioning was mostly negative, until Mr.
Wilde joined in. He expressed the view that CG couldn't lose. The land that
would be invested in not only would retain its value but would be worth more
with every passing year. For if Rouse's project didn't pan out, the land could
always be sold for a better price than what it cost.
The plan that was arrived at was for the land for the new city to be owned by a
subsidiary called Howard Research and Development Corporation. CG would own half
of that corporation and Rouse's Community Research and Development the other
half. CRD would be responsible for the management of the acquired land and for
preparing a master plan for development. CG also put up some of the money for
Columbia's infrastructure. The rest was supplied by Teachers Insurance and
Annuity Association and the Chase Manhattan Bank.
By the end of the summer of 1963 close to 14,000 acres (57 km²) Of Howard County
farmland had been acquired, and the time was at hand to begin planning what to
do with it. Rouse wanted to hear from a wide assortment of experts and scholars.
He brought together the Work Group, consisting of top people in health, family
life, education, recreation, government, transportation, and employment.
Ultimately emerging was the idea that the new city should be a real multi-faceted
city, not a bedroom suburb. It should be possible for its residents to find
everything they needed right there jobs, education, recreation, health care, and
any other necessity.
What would be the component parts of this city? How should it be divided? What
was the ideal size for the core component that would provide most of the
essentials for the optimal growth of human beings? According to Paul Marx, Rouse
was not reluctant to bring up his home town of Easton as the kind of place that
provided the best nourishment of the human spirit. Consensus formed around the
idea that the basic subdivision within the new city should be the village, a
unit of from 10,000-15,000 people. This number was thought to be the most likely
to foster a local feeling of identification: for merchants to get to know their
customers, ministers their memberships, and teachers their pupils and parents.
Within the city, there would be 12 villages, each to be like Rouse's Easton.
Each village would be a central place where people of different income levels
and types of housing would cross paths and mix. Each village would have most of
the services and resources usually found in an American small town. It would
have a middle school and a high school, a teen center, a supermarket, a library,
a hospital, an auditorium, offices, restaurants, some specialty shops, and a few
larger recreational facilities. It also would have a multi-denominational house
of worship. The hope was that one building would be used by several
religions. Marx says that Rouse wanted to defuse competition among different
religions and sects, reducing if not eliminating totally, the pursuit of
prestigious land, buildings, and the monetary wherewithal.
In addition to the villages there would be The Town Center. This would be the
new city's downtown. In it would be the central office of the city's governing
body, the Columbia Association. Here would be the main cluster of retail stores
(as part of the inevitable mall), a hotel and conference center, a hospital,
movie theaters and a concert hall, a community college, and branches of the
Maryland Institute of Art and the Peabody Conservatory of Music.
The main entertainment area was to be known as Tivoli, after the entertainment
area in Copenhagen. Early on Rouse said that he hoped Tivoli would be a place where,
under the benign influence of having fun and relaxing in familiar ways, people
would have opportunities, especially attractively and conveniently presented,
for discovering new ways to enjoy their free time new foods, new visual and
tactile aesthetic experiences, even new social relations. According to Marx,
Rouse's vision for downtown Columbia grew ever-more grandiose. Rouse wanted The
Town Center in Columbia to provide the most comprehensive range of recreational
activities and services that had ever been contemplated in a new town center.
Rouse again and again reminded his staff that Columbia would be “at the center
of a population of 4.5 million people growing to 6 million; that we are near by
one of the greatest tourist attractions in the United Statesmthe nation's
capital By 2008, however, Downtown Columbia had not yet become a regular stop
for tourists, as Rouse had hoped it would. A curious few come but not hordes.
Statues of James W. Rouse (right) and his brother, Willard, in Columbia,
Maryland by artist William F. Duffy. Willard RouseIII, Willard's son (James's
nephew), was another notable real estate developer. Photo taken by Jeff Kubina.
Starting in the mid-1970s and continuing into the 1980s he shifted focus to what
he ended up calling the "festival marketplace"; of which the Faneuil Hall
Marketplace was the first and most successful example. Completed in 1976, the
Faneuil Hall Marketplace ( comprising Quincy Market and other spaces adjacent to
Boston's Faneuil Hall) was designed by architect Benjamin C. Thompson, and was a
financial success, an act of historic preservation, and an anchor for urban
revitalization. However, at its inception, it was considered a highly risky
venture, and many critics felt it was doomed to fail. Rouse's innovative
business vision looked obvious in retrospect, but it was a bold contrarian move
with few friends at the outset.
Other examples of Rouse Company developments include South Street Seaport in New
York City, Market East in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Harborplace in Baltimore,
Maryland, Waterside in Norfolk, Virginia, St. Louis Union Station in St. Louis,
Missouri, Downtown Portland's Pioneer Place , and the Riverwalk of New
Orleans. This focus led TIME magazine to call him "the man who made cities fun
again."
After forty years at the Rouse Company, he retired in 1979. Soon afterwards, he
and his wife founded the Enterprise Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation
funded in part by a for-profit subsidiary, The Enterprise Community Partners,
Inc., and focused on seeding partnerships with community developers that address
the need for affordable housing and associated social services for poor
neighborhoods.
Through his daughter Robin, he is the grandfather of actor Edward Norton.
The Rouse Theatre in Wilde Lake High School is named after James. In May 2006,
an approximately four-mile stretch of Maryland Route 175 between Interstate 95
and U.S. Route 29 in Columbia, Maryland, was named after Rouse and his wife,
Patty.
He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995.