Columbia
From a distance, the brick and glass building on Gateway Drive casts an impressive profile. Sleek and angled, the suburban-modern structure rises up five stories from a field of yellowed grass, dominating a corner of the Columbia Gateway office park.
It's a symbol of Columbia's emerging role as capital of the Baltimore-Washington corridor.
The site, along Interstate 95, once was reserved for a sprawling General Electric complex, an industrial anchor designed to bring blue-collar jobs to the new city sprouting nearby. But Columbia's robust growth -- and the rapid development of the corridor -- soon attracted bankers and engineers to the site, too.
Today, Columbia's eastern edge has been recast as a modern office park, a cradle for young, high-technology companies.
But look closer. Look past the large sign that shouts: "LEASE"!
The silver-framed doors at 6751 Gateway Drive are locked. The parking lot is empty. And the large, tinted windows provide see-through views of barren office suites.
For all its promise as corridor capital, for all its affluence and lofty goals, the planned community of Columbia can't escape the problems triggered by a nationwide recession.
The economic slowdown has left Columbia Gateway, a 620-acre project of The Rouse Co., littered with vacant offices. Meanwhile, Rouse's plans for completing Columbia have been interrupted -- a move that has depressed earnings and has created a mood of cautiousness at the corporate headquarters.
Still, Rouse officials aren't panicking. They're pushing ahead with some low-risk projects in Columbia, including the new 165,000-square-foot headquarters for The Ryland Group. And they're resisting pressures to boost profits by slashing land prices or by loosening tight development controls in Columbia.
Douglas A. McGregor, a Rouse executive vice president and general manager of the Columbia project, dismisses such pressures. With the confidence -- or, some would say, arrogance -- that characterizes Rouse, he says simply, "Short-term profits are not what we're about."
That attitude reflects Rouse's unusual role in Columbia: somewhere between corporate citizen and benevolent despot.
The planned community was born in 1967, when James Rouse began subdividing 14,000 acres of farmland he had assembled. Mr. Rouse, founder of the company that bears his name, dreamed of a new kind of city, without the helter-skelter development common in American suburbs. His carefully sculpted city would be characterized by parks, cul-de-sacs and street names taken from Walt Whitman's poetry.
