ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, April 10, 1996 TAG: 9604100065
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BALTIMORE
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: Associated Press
URBAN VISIONARY JAMES ROUSE, 81, who preferred to build "warm places for people to go," died Tuesday.
James Rouse, an urban visionary who created some of the first shopping malls and a new concept of suburbia, brought retailing back to America's downtowns, and helped house thousands of poor people, died Tuesday of Lou Gehrig's disease. He was 81.
Rouse died at his Columbia home late Tuesday morning, said Cathy Lickteig, a spokeswoman for the Rouse Co., the real estate company he founded as a mortgage broker in 1939.
A native of rural Easton, Md., who was orphaned as a teen-ager, Rouse became a multimillionaire, but he always insisted that profit wasn't his primary motive.
``Profit is not the legitimate purpose of business,'' Rouse said in a 1992 interview. ``The legitimate purpose of business is to provide a product or service that people need and do it so well that it's profitable.''
Rouse, who attended the universities of Hawaii and Virginia in the early 1930s and received a law degree from the University of Maryland in 1937, received a 1995 Presidential Medal of Freedom. He coined the term ``urban renewal'' while serving on a federal housing commission in the 1950s.
He then turned his attention back downtown in 1976 with construction of Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston.
The first ``festival marketplace'' combined specialty shops in a historic setting, with a seemingly infinite variety of food. Musicians, comics and jugglers still perform along its squeaky clean, tree-lined walkways.
``It was a warm place for people to go ... not just a bunch of guys hawking whatever products there might be,'' said Benjamin Thompson, the architect who sold Rouse on the idea, then designed it.
Faneuil Hall was followed by Baltimore's Harborplace, New York's South Street Seaport, Atlanta's Underground, New Orleans' Riverwalk center, Waterside in Norfolk and others.
Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala said Rouse ``did more to revitalize American cities than anyone this century.''
Rouse also left an imprint on the American landscape.
His company built what it calls the East Coast's first indoor shopping mall in the 1950s, giving suburbanites in Glen Burnie, Md., variety and convenience by placing rows of stores facing each other across a walkway and surrounding it by acres of parking.
And in 1968, he sought a better way to develop suburbs than the prevalent haphazard sprawl. His firm bought 12,000 acres of farmland between Baltimore and Washington and built the planned city of Columbia, a community of 90,000 that is a model of ethnic and cultural diversity.
Columbia was designed as a place where people could communicate naturally. Each neighborhood has an elementary school at its center and people of different faiths worship under the same roof at ``interfaith centers.'' More than one-fourth of the city's acreage is devoted to recreation.
Dismayed over the crime, drugs and hopelessness that pervaded the inner cities of the 1980s, Rouse founded the Enterprise Foundation in 1982, three years after retiring as CEO of his development company.
The Enterprise Foundation's Neighborhood Transformation Program, begun in 1990, sought to be a model for revitalizing decaying inner cities. To date, it has helped build 61,000 homes in 150 cities nationwide.
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: James Rouse/Coined term ``urban renewal''by CNB