Antero Pietila
2007-08-01 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

BALTIMORE -

When Laura Lippman and David Simon tied the knot, another Baltimore icon — the Rev. John Waters, of the Universal Church of Pink Flamingos and Hairspray, or some such, blessed the union. No surprise there, hon.

But what should we make of the fact that Lippman, the queen of local mysteries, went to high school in Columbia? Simon, the masterful chronicler of inner-city pathologies, is no stranger to the planned city midway between Baltimore and Washington, either.

Over the past 40 years, Columbia’s residents have included a British air commander who invented the jet engine, Linda Tripp, a central figure in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and actor Edward Norton, a grandson of Columbia’s founder, James W. Rouse. Clearly Columbia has come of age.

Several recent books have memorialized Rouse, the visionary developer of shopping malls and new communities. The latest, hot off the presses, is “New City Upon A Hill: A History of Columbia, Maryland.” It deserves a careful reading and wide circulation.

Columbia has always fascinated me. In the late 1960s, I dragged European visitors there to see the first villages and an impressive multi-media show labeling Columbia The Next America. The skillfully produced sales presentation was unique in its time — and would be today — because it promoted racial and economic diversity as a community goal and real estate virtue.

This was revolutionary. In 1963, when Rouse first unveiled his plan for a non-discriminatory new city, the Baltimore-area real estate industry practiced segregation. That’s what whites wanted. Anyone doubting that should remember the crowd of more than 2,000 people who booed and spat upon Lawrence Cardinal Shehan as the Catholic archbishop spoke in favor of a desegregation bill before the Baltimore City Council in 1967. Opposing the bill, the real estate board called it “a gross and flagrant flouting of the human right of property disposition.”

Yet no one tried to stop the heresy of Rouse, who initially assembled more than 14,000 acres, buying it clandestinely from farmers. Equally amazing was Rouse’s ability to finance his new city and make its unorthodox vision acceptable in the market. Today, some 100,000 people live in Columbia in nine villages and the downtown town center. Communities bordering Columbia proper are among the wealthiest in America.

I once asked James Rouse about his regrets. He said the biggest was his failure to seek higher densities for the villages. For that reason, a frequent community bus that might have replaced many car trips never launched.

Columbia has disappointed me too.

I am not a religious man. But I always found something bold and very refreshing in Rouse’s idea of a common Interfaith center. Columbia residents were not ready for such a radical exercise of ecumenism but wanted individual churches and synagogues. What a pity.

This probably was inevitable. For a mortgage banker, Rouse showed remarkable financial naivete. He seemed to think he could isolate Columbia from market forces. Instead, from the early 1970s onward, steadily rising housing prices eroded his hope that almost anyone could live in his new city. That put a damper on diversity, and Columbia steadily started to resemble typical suburbs.

Rouse did not envision The Next America to be without problems. But he believed crime could be controlled and social issues ameliorated. He would be deeply saddened if he saw today’s tendency to divide villages into good or bad ones on the basis of race and income.

Antero Pietila is writing a book about how bigotry shaped the Baltimore metropolitan area. He can be reached at hap5905@hotmail.com.