James Wilson Rouse (April 26, 1914 - April 9, 1996), founder of
The Rouse CompanyThe Rouse Company, founded by James W. Rouse in 1939, was a publicly held shopping mall and community developer from 1956 until 2004, when General Growth Properties Inc...
, was a pioneering
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
real estate developer, civic activist, and later, free enterprise-based
philanthropistA philanthropist is someone who engages in philanthropy; that is, someone who donates his or her time, money, and/or reputation to charitable causes...
. He is the maternal grandfather of actor
Edward NortonEdward Harrison Norton is an American film actor, screenwriter and director. In 1996, his supporting role in the courtroom drama Primal Fear garnered him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. A year later, his lead role as a reformed white power skinhead in American History...
.
Rouse was born in
Easton, MarylandEaston is a city in Talbot County, Maryland, United States. The population was 11,708 at the 2000 census, and 14,677 according to current July 2008 census estimates. It is the county seat of Talbot County. The primary ZIP Code is 21601, and the secondary is 21606 The primary phone exchange is...
, the son of Lydia (née Robinson) and Willard Goldsmith Rouse, a canned-foods broker. He attended college and graduated from the
University of MarylandThe University of Maryland School of Law is the third-oldest law school in the United States by date of first classes and second-oldest by date of establishment. The school was founded in 1816 and began regular instruction in 1824 as the Maryland Law Institute...
law school during the
Great DepressionThe Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
; after graduating in 1937 he worked for the
Federal Housing AdministrationThe Federal Housing Administration is a United States government agency created as part of the National Housing Act of 1934. The goals of this organization are: to improve housing standards and conditions; to provide an adequate home financing system through insurance of mortgage loans; and to...
and in 1939 he was a partner with Hunter Moss at a
mortgageA mortgage is the transfer of an interest in property to a lender as a security for a debt - usually a loan of money. While a mortgage in itself is not a debt, it is the lender's security for a debt...
banking firm called the Moss-Rouse Company, which would eventually become the Rouse Company.
After
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
he became involved in
Baltimore, MarylandBaltimore is an independent city and the largest city in the state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore City in order to distinguish it from surrounding...
's efforts to rehabilitate its decayed housing stock.
James Wilson Rouse (April 26, 1914 - April 9, 1996), founder of
The Rouse CompanyThe Rouse Company, founded by James W. Rouse in 1939, was a publicly held shopping mall and community developer from 1956 until 2004, when General Growth Properties Inc...
, was a pioneering
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
real estate developer, civic activist, and later, free enterprise-based
philanthropistA philanthropist is someone who engages in philanthropy; that is, someone who donates his or her time, money, and/or reputation to charitable causes...
. He is the maternal grandfather of actor
Edward NortonEdward Harrison Norton is an American film actor, screenwriter and director. In 1996, his supporting role in the courtroom drama Primal Fear garnered him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. A year later, his lead role as a reformed white power skinhead in American History...
.
Youth, education, early career
Rouse was born in
Easton, MarylandEaston is a city in Talbot County, Maryland, United States. The population was 11,708 at the 2000 census, and 14,677 according to current July 2008 census estimates. It is the county seat of Talbot County. The primary ZIP Code is 21601, and the secondary is 21606 The primary phone exchange is...
, the son of Lydia (née Robinson) and Willard Goldsmith Rouse, a canned-foods broker. He attended college and graduated from the
University of MarylandThe University of Maryland School of Law is the third-oldest law school in the United States by date of first classes and second-oldest by date of establishment. The school was founded in 1816 and began regular instruction in 1824 as the Maryland Law Institute...
law school during the
Great DepressionThe Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
; after graduating in 1937 he worked for the
Federal Housing AdministrationThe Federal Housing Administration is a United States government agency created as part of the National Housing Act of 1934. The goals of this organization are: to improve housing standards and conditions; to provide an adequate home financing system through insurance of mortgage loans; and to...
and in 1939 he was a partner with Hunter Moss at a
mortgageA mortgage is the transfer of an interest in property to a lender as a security for a debt - usually a loan of money. While a mortgage in itself is not a debt, it is the lender's security for a debt...
banking firm called the Moss-Rouse Company, which would eventually become the Rouse Company.
After
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
he became involved in
Baltimore, MarylandBaltimore is an independent city and the largest city in the state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore City in order to distinguish it from surrounding...
's efforts to rehabilitate its decayed housing stock. This led to his participation in
Dwight D. EisenhowerDwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was a five-star general in the United States Army and the 34th President of the United States, from 1953 until 1961. During the Second World War, he served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, with responsibility for planning and supervising the...
's National Housing Task Force starting in 1953. He introduced (or at least helped popularize) the term "
urban renewalUrban renewal is a program of land redevelopment in areas of moderate to high density urban land use. Its modern incarnation began in the late 19th century in developed nations and experienced an intense phase in the late 1940s – under the rubric of reconstruction...
" to describe the series of recommendations made by that task force.
Shopping malls
In 1958, Rouse built
Harundale MallHarundale Mall, one of the first enclosed shopping malls, was located in Glen Burnie, Maryland, United States at the intersection of Ritchie Highway and Aquahart Road. Harundale Mall has been replaced by Harundale Plaza located at the same location...
in
Glen Burnie, MarylandGlen Burnie is a census-designated place in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, United States, and is a suburb of Baltimore. The population was 38,922 at the 2000 census.-History:...
, the first enclosed shopping center east of the
Mississippi RiverThe Mississippi River is the second longest river in the United States, with a length of from its source in Lake Itasca in Minnesota to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico....
and the first built by a real estate developer. His company used the term "mall" to describe the development, which was an alternative to the more typical
strip mallA strip mall is an open area shopping center where the stores are arranged in a row, with a sidewalk in front. Strip malls are typically developed as a unit and have large parking lots in front...
s usually built in the suburbs (the "mall" in "strip mall" came into usage later, after the enclosed mall had been popularized by Rouse's company). Although many now attribute the rise of the
shopping mallA shopping mall, shopping centre or shopping center is a building or multiple buildings consisting of a complex of shops representing leading merchandisers, with interconnecting walkways enabling visitors to easily walk from unit to unit, along with a convenient parking area – a modern,...
to the decline of the American
downtownDowntown is a term primarily used in North America to refer to a city's core or central business district, usually in a geographical, commercial, and community sense....
core, Rouse's focus at the time was on the introduction of malls as a form of town center for the
suburbSuburbs are defined in various different ways around the world. They can be the residential areas of a large city, or separate residential communities within commuting distance of a city. Some suburbs have a degree of political autonomy, and most have lower population density than inner city...
s.
His company became an active developer and manager of shopping center and mall properties, even as he shifted focus to new projects which eventually included planned communities and festival marketplaces.
Planned communities
In the 1960s Rouse turned his focus to planned communities. After engaging in a planning exercise for the Pocatinco Hills estate of the Rockefellers, Rouse constructed his first planned residential development: the
Village of Cross KeysVillage of Cross Keys is a privately-owned upscale area of Baltimore, Maryland. It is located off Falls Road between Northern Parkway and Coldspring Lane, and is home to luxury condos and upscale small shops...
in Baltimore. On June 16, 1961, Rouse bought inside the city from the Baltimore Country Club for $25,000 an acre. Rouse excitedly proclaimed that this undertaking “will be the largest, and potentially most important development in the history of Baltimore.” Rouse hoped that 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, D.C.Washington, D.C. , formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, the District, or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States, founded on July 16, 1790...
, 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 who could afford to live there. The development was a mixture of townhouses, garden apartments, a high-rise apartment house designed by Frank Gehry, stores grouped around a 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 still under construction, Rouse decided to build a whole new
city. The creation of
Columbia, MarylandColumbia is a planned community that consists of ten self-contained villages, located in Howard County, Maryland, United States. Columbia is a suburb of Baltimore and, to a lesser degree, Washington, D.C. It began with the idea that a city could enhance its residents' quality of life. Creator and...
, between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., was the greatest adventure of Rouse’s life. Columbia was the ultimate opportunity: the chance to embody his ideals in a whole new city. For the undertaking that would become Columbia, Rouse turned to his partner in previous projects, the
Connecticut General Life Insurance CompanyCIGNA Corporation is an American for profit health insurance company. The health care headquarters are located in Bloomfield, Connecticut, while the corporate headquarters are located at Two Liberty Place in Center City Philadelphia, Pennsylvania...
("CG"). 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 Wilde joined in. He expressed the view that CG couldn’t lose. If Rouse’s project did not succeed, the land could always be sold, and probably for a higher price than what it cost.
The land for the new city would be owned by a subsidiary called Howard Research and Development Corporation. CG would own half of that corporation and Rouse’s corporation the other half. Rouse 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 BankChase is the consumer and commercial banking division of JPMorgan Chase. The bank was known as Chase Manhattan Bank until it merged with JPMorgan in 2000. Chase Manhattan Bank was formed by the merger of the Chase National Bank and the Bank of the Manhattan Company in 1955...
.
By the end of the summer of 1963 close to of
Howard CountyHoward County is a county located in the central part of the U.S. state of Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. It is considered part of the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area....
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 an assemblage which became known as "the Work Group." It consisted 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? 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 village would have a central gathering place where people of different income levels and types of housing would cross paths and mix. Each village 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 known as an "interfaith center." The hope was that one building would be used by several religions.
In addition to the villages there would be a core area that would function as 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 (arranged as a mall), a hotel and conference center, a hospital, movie theaters and a concert hall, a community college, and branches of the
Maryland Institute College of ArtMaryland Institute College of Art is an art college in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. It was founded in 1826 as the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, making it one of the first and oldest art colleges in the United States. In 2008, MICA was tied for #4 in the nation among fine...
and the Peabody Conservatory of Music.
The main entertainment area was to be known as Tivoli, after the entertainment area in
CopenhagenCopenhagen ; ) is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban area with a population of 1,167,569 and a metropolitan area with a population of 1,875,179...
. 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.” 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.
Festival marketplaces
Starting in the mid-1970s and continuing into the 1980s Rouse shifted focus to what he ended up calling the "
festival marketplaceA festival marketplace is a concept of James W. Rouse and the Rouse Company in the United States to revitalize downtown areas in major cities in the late 20th century...
", of which the Faneuil Hall Marketplace was the first and most successful example. Completed in 1976, the Faneuil Hall Marketplace (comprising
Quincy MarketQuincy Market is a historic building near Faneuil Hall Marketplace in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. It was constructed 1824–1826 and named in honor of Mayor Josiah Quincy, who organized its construction without any tax or debt.-History:...
and other spaces adjacent to Boston's
Faneuil HallFaneuil Hall , located near the waterfront and today's Government Center, in Boston, Massachusetts, has been a marketplace and a meeting hall since 1742. It was the site of several speeches by Samuel Adams, James Otis, and others encouraging independence from Great Britain, and is now part of...
) was designed by architect
Benjamin C. ThompsonBenjamin C. Thompson was an American architect.Thompson was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, graduated from Yale University in 1941, then spent four years in the United States Navy fighting in World War II...
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 supporters at the outset.
Other examples of Rouse Company "festival marketplace" developments include
South Street SeaportThe South Street Seaport is a historic area in the New York City borough of Manhattan, located where Fulton Street meets the East River, and adjacent to the Financial District. The Seaport is usually considered a historical district, distinct from the neighboring Financial District...
in New York City,
Market EastMarket East could refer to:*Market East, Philadelphia, a neighborhood located in the Center City area, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.*Market East Station, a commuter rail station located in Philadelphia....
in
PhiladelphiaPhiladelphia is the largest city in Pennsylvania and the sixth-most-populous city in the United States.In 2008, the population of the city proper was estimated to be over 1.4 million, while the metropolitan area's population of 5.8 million made it the country's fifth-largest...
,
HarborplaceHarborplace is a festival marketplace in Baltimore, Maryland, that opened in 1980 as a centerpiece of the revival of downtown Baltimore. As its name suggests, it is located on the Inner Harbor....
in
BaltimoreBaltimore is an independent city and the largest city in the state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore City in order to distinguish it from surrounding...
,
St. Louis Union StationSt. Louis Union Station, a National Historic Landmark, is a former passenger train terminal in St. Louis, Missouri. Once the world's largest and busiest train station, it was converted in the early 1980s into a luxury hotel, shopping center, and entertainment complex...
in
St. LouisSt. Louis is an independent city in the U.S. state of Missouri. With an estimated population of 354,361 in 2008, it is the principal municipality of Greater St. Louis, population 2,866,517, the largest urban area in Missouri and sixteenth largest in the United States...
,
Downtown Portland'sPortland is a city located in the Northwestern United States, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the state of Oregon. As of July 2008, it has an estimated population of 575,930, making it the 29th most populous in the United States. It has been referred to as the most...
Pioneer PlacePioneer Place is an upscale, urban shopping mall in downtown Portland, Oregon. It consists of four blocks of retail, dining, parking, and an office tower named Pioneer Tower. The mall itself is spread out between four buildings, interconnected by skywalks or underground mall sections...
, and the
Riverwalk MarketplaceRiverwalk Marketplace is a mall located in the Central Business District of New Orleans, Louisiana. The mall is located along the Mississippi River waterfront stretching from the base of Canal Street upriver to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center...
of
New OrleansNew Orleans is a major U.S. port and the largest city in the state of Louisiana. New Orleans is the center of the New Orleans Metropolitan Area, the largest metro area in the state....
. The early festival marketplaces like Faneuil Hall and Harborplace led
TIMETime is a component of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects...
magazine to dub Rouse "the man who made cities fun again."
After 40 years at the Rouse Company, James Rouse retired from day-to-day management in 1979. Soon afterwards, he and his wife founded the Enterprise Foundation, a not-for-profit
foundationA foundation is a legal categorization of nonprofit organizations. Foundations may also and often have charitable purposes. This type of nonprofit organization may either donate funds and support to other organizations, or provide the sole source of funding for their own charitable...
funded in part by a for-profit
subsidiaryA subsidiary, in business matters, is an entity that is controlled by a separate entity. The controlled entity is called a company, corporation, or limited liability company and in some cases can be a government or state-owned enterprise, and the controlling entity is called its parent...
, The Enterprise Development Company, and focused on seeding partnerships with community groups that would address the need for affordable housing and associated social services for poor neighborhoods.
The Rouse Theatre in
Wilde Lake High SchoolWilde Lake High School is a secondary school located in Columbia, Maryland's Village of Wilde Lake, one of 12 public high schools in Howard County. Opened in 1971, it was Columbia's first high school. It had a unique open doughnut-shaped design with "open classrooms" and was a model school for new...
is named after James. In May 2006, an approximately four-mile stretch of
Maryland Route 175-Annapolis Road:MD 175 begins at MD 3, just south of the latter's northern terminus at Interstate 97, known as Annapolis Road. It runs west as a two-lane suburban highway, passing through local neighborhoods and south of Arundel High School before widening into a four-lane suburban arterial south...
between
Interstate 95Interstate 95 in Maryland is a major highway that runs diagonally from northeast to southwest, from Maryland's border with Delaware, to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, briefly entering the District of Columbia before reaching Virginia...
and
U.S. Route 29U.S. Route 29 is a north-south United States highway that runs for 1,036 miles from the western suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland, to Pensacola, Florida. The highway's northern terminus is at Maryland Route 99 in Ellicott City, Maryland. Its southern terminus is at U.S. Route 90 and U.S. Route 98 in...
in Columbia, Maryland, was named after Rouse and his wife, Patty.
Mr. Rouse was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1981. Rouse received the
Presidential Medal of FreedomThe Presidential Medal of Freedom is a decoration bestowed by the President of the United States and is, along with theequivalent Congressional Gold Medal bestowed by an act of U.S. Congress, the highest civilian award in the U.S...
in 1995.
External links