THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, April 10, 1996 TAG: 9604100340
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: FROM STAFF & WIRE REPORTS
LENGTH: Long : 108 lines
James W. Rouse, a visionary who created the urban ``festival marketplaces,'' including Norfolk's Waterside in 1983, died Tuesday. He was 81.
Rouse died at his home in Columbia, Md., where he lived with his wife, Patricia, a Norfolk native and a former commissioner of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority.
The cause of his death was Lou Gehrig's disease, said Cathy Lickteig, a Rouse Co. spokeswoman.
Renowned internationally for his innovative plans to rejuvenate downtowns, Rouse had longtime connections with Norfolk.
Norfolk City Councilman Mason C. Andrews has worked with Rouse since the late 1950s, when Andrews traveled to Baltimore to discuss a Chamber of Commerce project with Rouse.
Rouse's first active involvement in Norfolk was an effort to build a shopping mall downtown in 1963 on the 17 acres where MacArthur Center is planned. The effort failed after a committed department store was bought out by another company, Andrews said.
In 1983, Rouse's Enterprise Development Corp. opened Waterside on the downtown waterfront of the Elizabeth River.
About the same time, Rouse's Enterprise Foundation began helping Norfolk's Olde Huntersville Development Corp., a nonprofit inner-city neighborhood revitalization company headed by Beatrice Jennings and Beatrice Garvin.
All of Rouse's efforts - from mortgage banking to shopping mall development to festival marketplaces - featured a desire to help people and a faith in their ability to overcome difficult circumstances, Andrews said.
``His heart was always in making the city better,'' Andrews said. ``The main thing was his unstoppable optimism about the potential of the human spirit. He always had tremendous energy and extensive knowledge about what he was doing.''
Rouse's work and concern were recognized by presidents, including President Clinton, who awarded Rouse the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Sept. 28, 1995.
At the time, Guy Friddell, a columnist for The Virginian-Pilot, wrote that Rouse's ``regard for the underdog and his strength derive from roots in the Depression'' in Easton, Md., on the Eastern Shore.
``I had a very bad year in my life,'' Rouse once said. ``My mother died in February. I was 16 in April and graduated from high school that June. My father died in August and the mortgage was foreclosed in October. I can remember thinking, `This is tough, but this is good for me.' It's always stuck with me. I knew somehow that I was going through a period that was strengthening.''
Rouse founded The Rouse Co. in Baltimore in 1939 as a mortgage broker and built it into one of the country's largest development companies.
The son of a canned goods wholesaler, 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 coined the term ``urban renewal'' while serving on a federal housing commission in the 1950s and turned his attention back to downtowns in 1976 with construction of Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston.
The first ``festival marketplace'' combined specialty shops in a historic setting, with a variety of food. Musicians, comics and jugglers performed 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 and other marketplaces that attract millions of visitors each year and have spurred construction of new hotels, offices and homes in once-decaying downtowns.
In the 1960s, 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 76,000 that is a model of ethnic and cultural diversity.
Columbia was designed as a place where people could naturally communicate, he said. 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.
``We created ways for people to care more deeply about one another, to stimulate, encourage, release creativity, minimize intolerance and bigotry,'' Rouse said.
Dismayed over the crime, drugs and hopelesness 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 foundation's lofty goal was to give every poor person in America a chance at clean and affordable housing within a generation.
Using tax incentives, public and private grants, donated building materials and volunteers, the foundation helped build tens of thousands of homes in 90 cities.
Rouse moved his company to Columbia and, shunning more exclusive locales, lived there in a ranch house. He had a simple answer when asked why he devoted his final years to helping others.
``The answer is `Why not?' '' Rouse said. ``Why isn't it natural for people who have lived and worked at something to want to use the knowledge and capacity in a new way, free from the burden of making a living?''
MEMO: Staff writers Alex Marshall and Mike Knepler contributed to this
report.
ILLUSTRATION: Color FILE photo
James Rouse, whose ties to Norfolk go back decades, was married to a
Norfolk native and helped to rejuvenate the city's Huntersville
section.
by CNB