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ROUSE LEFT MARK ON ALL MALLS, NOT JUST HIS OWN

James W. Rouse

The late James W. Rouse, already famous for developing suburban malls, urban renewal projects and a whole planned community in Maryland, took a trip to Florida’s Walt Disney World in 1972. According to published accounts, he found the amusement park utterly charming. Then, upon returning home to Maryland, he received a letter from architect Ben Thompson, who was looking for a developer to help reimagine a ramshackle section of downtown Boston. Thus the stage was set for Faneuil Hall, the first festival marketplace.

Thompson, former architecture chairman of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, envisioned transforming three dilapidated 18th-century marketplace buildings between Faneuil Hall, a market and meeting place, and the Boston waterfront into a fun-filled shopping and entertainment mecca. Rouse met with Thompson, the two connected and the project was under way, according to Better Places Better Lives: A Biography of James Rouse by Joshua Olsen.

But employees of The Rouse Co. who traveled to the site didn’t all share Rouse’s enthusiasm for the project, Olsen writes. As they toured the buildings, built between 1742 and 1826, they saw only a smattering of produce merchants and meat markets. They encountered rats and discovered garbage floating in a basement where water had seeped in from the harbor. As if that weren’t enough, the firm also had to compete with a rival developer for the city’s blessing.

Lenders took a dim view of the project too, wrote Nancy E. Cohen in her book, America’s Marketplace: The History of Shopping Centers, published in 2002 by ICSC. “Rouse finally cobbled together the required funding from a dozen Boston banks,” Cohen wrote.

Rouse told SCT in 1991 that “the few that did lend to us said they were doing it more for patriotic reasons than in a belief the project would succeed.” The American bicentennial year of 1976 was approaching and had become the target for reopening the marketplace.

As rehab work proceeded, old boards were torn away to reveal details of the Greek Revival architecture that lay beneath. The plan combined old and new, opening up the view while preserving original appointments. The aim was to foster a feeling of informality and fun, not to create a sense of awe, Olsen wrote. Merchants were expected to offer food, flowers and eclectic crafts that weren’t wrapped in plastic.

Some of the people involved felt nervous about the opening date. The Quincy Market portion of the project was scheduled to open Aug. 26, 1976, exactly 150 years after merchants in the first building on the site had welcomed their first customers. But, as Olsen noted, in August many of Boston’s workers are out of town on vacation, while the area’s students have not yet returned for fall classes.

Finding enough tenants to fill the center proved challenging, too. Rouse people searched New England for small specialty merchants, but half the space was still unsigned six months before the planned opening; a quarter of the stalls remained vacant. Then somebody had an idea, and the temporary tenant concept was born.

“I had seen photos of pushcarts in Europe and felt that if we could fill them with merchandise it would not only reduce the impact of empty store spaces, but it would give the market great color, life and energy,” recalls Larry M. Wolf, CLS, CSM, then a leasing rep who retired from Rouse in 1997 as senior vice president and director of retail leasing. “Most of the carts on opening day were set up by our own leasing people selling such things as birdseed, bricks from the buildings and anything else we could get our hands on.”

It worked. Some merchants who were reluctant to commit to taking stall space were willing to gamble on a cart for a weekly rental fee.

Many in the company thought the center would ruin the company. Even the project’s supporters believed the center had to achieve success immediately to survive; Rouse himself was quoted at the time as saying Faneuil Hall didn’t have time to take off gradually.

But the combination of entertainment, unusual shopping and festive atmosphere attracted city dwellers. About 100,000 people visited on the first day, according to Olsen. The center got good reviews, and crowds kept coming. Half the visitors came from Boston, a quarter from the suburbs and the rest were tourists, Olsen wrote. In fact, more people visited the center that first year than went to Disneyland, he wrote. Rouse suburban malls were making $150 per square foot at the time, but Faneuil made $235 per square foot that first year, and it soon reached $300, Olsen reported.

The South Market opened at Faneuil Hall Marketplace on Aug. 26, 1977, and the North Market opened a year later. Rouse Co. later battled with tenants and its own leasing people over maintaining the marketplace atmosphere. Many wanted to introduce tourist goods and fast food, but Rouse wanted small, specialty shops run by their owners.

“We were determined to try to make sure this place was no tourist trap,” Wolf said.

Many people, including some inside the company, thought Rouse’s pioneering Faneuil Hall Marketplace, in Boston, would break the company. The buildings were a mess, lenders were skittish, and it was tough to get retailers, at first.

Developers and officials from other cities came to Boston to study Faneuil, and over the next decade more than 60 cities had developed downtown retail projects, Olsen wrote. Not all of them were successful; many in smaller cities failed to take off. Rouse Co. itself went on to build The Gallery at Market Street East, Philadelphia, in 1977, and Harborplace, in Baltimore, in 1980, both festival marketplaces.

Some consider Ghiradelli Square, in San Francisco, the first festival marketplace because it preceded Faneuil by 15 years and was a retail project in renovated older buildings. Others disagree, saying it is dependent on tourists rather than local city dwellers, is not downtown and does not have a festival atmosphere.

Faneuil was a project Rouse took up after a long history in development. But it was far from being the first that revealed his streak of imagination and originality. His first regional center opened in Baltimore in 1956 with a Sears, Roebuck and Co. department store and two grocers as anchors. His Waverly Tower, opened in 1957, was the retail component of a Baltimore redevelopment project that included apartment buildings, and he considered it the first privately financed urban renewal effort in the country.

He opened Talbottown shopping center in Easton, Md., in 1957. Reflecting his lifelong concern for the economic and social health of communities, it was located at the end of one of the town’s main streets to bolster the downtown. In 1958, he opened Harundale Mall, in Burnie, Md., by some accounts the first enclosed mall built by a real estate developer. (Southdale, Edina, Minn., built in 1956, was actually the first enclosed mall, but it was developed by a retailer, Dayton Hudson.)

Charles Center, an urban renewal project in downtown Baltimore, came later, as did Cherry Hill (N.J.) Mall, which opened 1961 and was designed by the renowned Victor Gruen in an L-shape, with fountains and palms to attract tourists. Also in Baltimore, in 1965 Rouse built the Village of Cross Keys, an open-air alternative to the regional mall.

Rouse built an entire town with several buildings designed by Frank Gehry and called it Columbia, Md. Another notable center is Santa Monica Place, in Los Angeles. With his Enterprise Development Co., a company he founded after retiring from Rouse, he later built centers in Sydney, Australia; and Osaka, Japan.

Another enduring Rouse Co. creation is the food court, where shoppers pause to eat and thus extend their mall stays. His first attempt, in Plymouth Meeting (Pa.) Mall in 1971, failed, with a food court later deemed too small and insufficiently varied. Correcting those errors, Rouse created a successful food court that opened in 1974 at the Paramus Park Mall in New Jersey. Its second-floor location drew shoppers to the higher level.

“Jim Rouse wanted to create what he saw as community picnics,” Robert Rubenkonig, Rouse’s communications director, said of the food courts. “They’re open areas — a great idea that stuck. Consumers have voted with their pocketbooks.”

Rouse was highly esteemed outside the retail real estate industry, too, because he was willing to use his business acumen to help the poor. After retiring from Rouse Co. in 1979, he devoted himself to addressing social problems through the charitable organizations he founded, including The Enterprise Foundation, which works with neighborhood groups for affordable housing, jobs and child care; and the Neighborhood Transformation Program, an inner-city renewal institution in Baltimore. In 1981 Time magazine called Rouse an “urban visionary,” and in September 1995 President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.

— EM

Donna Mitchell contributed to this story.

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