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YOU CANNOT TELL THE STORY OF
COLUMBIA’S FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY
WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT
DEVELOPER
JAMES ROUSE
. AFTER ALL, THERE
WOULD BE NO COLUMBIA WITHOUT HIM.
THE MAN
BEHIND IT ALL
Celebrating
Columbia’s
first birthday
BORN IN
Easton, Maryland,
in 1914, Rouse was already
a successful businessman
and developer – having all
but invented the modern
shopping mall – when he
shifted his focus in 1963 to
creating not another building
or complex, but an entire
community – or, as he termed
it, “a garden to grow people.”
Rouse may have been
ahead of his time, but he
was also clearly influenced
by the times during which
he lived. America in 1963
was a country experiencing
great racial turmoil, but it
was also a country full of
hope, so much hope that
it believed it could send
a man to the moon.
In this atmosphere of both
unity and divide, Rouse
envisioned a city free of
racial segregation – in fact,
segregation of any form.
He wanted to approach
the building of this new
town not merely through
blueprints and economics,
but through the idea of
creating a “better” place.
IN MANY WAYS,
Rouse succeeded in this
incredibly ambitious mission.
In fact, just last year,
Money
magazine named
Columbia the #1 Best
Place to Live in the U.S.
Rouse (and the Rouse
Company) would go on
to create other innovative
concepts, such as the
first festival marketplace,
epitomized by Baltimore’s
Harborplace, among
others. Rouse would serve
for presidents and achieve
fame in other ways,
but he will likely always
be best remembered
as the mastermind
behind Columbia,
and rightly so.
James Rouse died
in Columbia in April
1996, but his planned
utopia continues to
live and prosper, and
serve as proof that
change for the better
is indeed possible.
“James Rouse has
changed this country.”
--
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON
, 1995, when awarding
Rouse the Presidential Medal of Freedom
Columbia
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PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF COLUMBIA ARCHIVES