WHEN BARBARA and Charles Russell wanted to get married in 1966, they had to go to Washington because interracial marriages were not yet legal in Maryland.

As a white woman and a black man, they worried about finding a company that would rent an apartment to them in the state. Their friends warned them finding housing would be difficult. A lawyer could offer them only the insight that he hadn't heard of interracial couples being arrested in Maryland for living together.

In the summer of 1967, the Russells stopped by Bryant Gardens apartments in the raw new community of Columbia and were shocked when a rental agent asked whether they wanted to live there.

"We just put our money down that day simply because it was a place in the country that would rent to us," Barbara Russell said.

Today, Russell, 61, still lives in Columbia -- a sprawling real estate experiment that came to stand in the turbulent years that followed its start as a visionary expression of the American dream.

The vision came from James W. Rouse, an early developer of shopping malls who hoped to use Columbia to provide answers to some of America's most vexing social problems and to make a bundle of money while he was at it.

Many of Columbia's pioneers, as the community's first residents call themselves, were enticed by Rouse's promise -- people of diverse ethnic and economic classes would live side by side, an ambitious goal coming just a few years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a pivotal point for desegregation.

Community mailboxes, swimming pools, village shopping plazas and interfaith centers would bring people together and foster a welcoming environment. Most signs and other commercial clutter would be banned or hidden. Covenants would protect the carefully designed green landscape. Parks and recreation centers would be an easy walk from every home.

Rouse lived his Columbia dream in an expansive waterfront home in Wilde Lake, the community's first village, until his death in 1996.

Today, nearly two generations after the first bright promises, many others from the early years also are gone. Rouse's original vision of diversity and community fellowship has faded, many acknowledge.

Most newcomers pick Columbia these days for its amenities and convenient location. Economic and social diversity is not necessarily on their minds. Now, Columbians worry about crime and decay, just like folks elsewhere.

But this uncommon place still has a tight hold on the hearts of its pioneers. As Columbia prepares to celebrate its birthday this month, surprising numbers remain, and many have no intention of leaving.

"Unless something drastic happens, it's going to be feet first out," said George Martin, 71, one of Columbia's first residents.

It was in October of 1963 that the Rouse Co. announced it had purchased more than 14,000 acres to develop a community for about 100,000 people. Only about 48,000 people lived in all of Howard County at the time.

Rouse called his new city "The Next America" and pledged that Columbia would provide a better quality of life for all of its residents.

Side by side

Rouse "was very proud of the fact that the janitor and the boss could live in the same neighborhood," said his widow, Patty Rouse. "He said it worked out in his neighborhood because the woman that did some of the cleaning at the Rouse Co. lived in the same area of Wilde Lake that we live in."

People started moving into Wilde Lake apartments and houses in June and July of 1967, the year Maryland legalized interracial marriages, and Hollywood released Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, starring Sidney Poitier as half of an interracial couple.

In September of that year, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People alleged that housing discrimination in Howard County "is about as effective and thorough as it is any place in the United States." At the same time, the organization singled out Columbia as a development where such prejudice was nonexistent.

Still, Columbia's new residents had something to learn about living together.

When the Russells, who have since divorced, moved into their apartment in July, another couple moving in a floor above assumed that Charles Russell was the complex's handyman and asked him to help them move in. He did -- and then he introduced himself as their neighbor.

"Jim Rouse might have talked about an open or integrated community, but people didn't have any experience with it," said Barbara Russell, who is a Columbia Council representative for the village of Oakland Mills, where she later moved. "It took a while for people to realize, 'Oh, this means we're all living together, going to the store together, going to church together.'"

The first baby

When Russell gave birth to her first son Sept. 13, 1967, he was also Columbia's first baby -- a biracial child. Rouse couldn't have scripted it better.

"[Rouse] was really thrilled, and he talked about our family in those early years wherever he went," Russell said.

Newspaper and magazine stories about Columbia drew many residents attracted by Rouses' egalitarian ideas.

Martin had lived in Baltimore, where, he said, he saw people being denied housing because of race, so he was excited about the opportunity to live in an open community. He wanted to be a part of the inaugural effort in a place that offered new beginnings.

"I just felt that this was a way that we could help to change things, just from a moral and ethical standpoint," he said. "People should be able to live where they wanted to live, and this was the place that was going to expand on that."

Martin estimated his family was the fifth to buy a house in Columbia, moving in on Evening Wind Court in August 1967. They live there today. The house cost $29,500. Today, the state assesses its worth at just under $160,000.

Bernard Bennett and his family moved in on nearby Green Mountain Circle because he didn't like the racial dividing lines that "you just didn't cross" in Baltimore.

"When I came down from New York, [Baltimore] wasn't really what I was expecting," said Bennett, 70. "I saw Columbia, and I moved in the first chance I had."

Celonia Walden and her husband, Emerson, moved into a former developer's home on Hyla Brook Road in 1968.

Attending school in Columbia, the Waldens' daughter was able to socialize with a mix of children. Celonia Walden -- who has a master's degree in education -- never had a white teacher in the segregated schools she attended.

"It was wonderful because we're all human beings," said Celonia Walden, 79. "I mean, you can't deny that."

Potential homebuyers and renters learned about Columbia and its vision by visiting a lakefront exhibit center (an early effort of now-renowned architect Frank Gehry) where builders would distribute information about homes, and a slide show gave an overview of what Columbia promised to be, said Barbara Kellner, manager of the Columbia Archives. Hundreds of people came daily, and there were thousands on the weekends, she said.

Criticized from start

Despite the lofty goals of the new development's planners and residents, Columbia was criticized from the start for failing to live up to its dream of social and economic diversity.

A planning director in Howard County told The Sun in July 1967 that Columbia's housing prices -- $19,750 for the least expensive home and $128 for the lowest monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment -- excluded people with low incomes.

But in the 1960s Columbia's doors seemed wide open to most.

"It was exciting to be on the ground floor of something that was brand new," said Helen Ruther, who moved to the Bryant Gardens apartments in fall 1967.

The opportunities to create groups or start activities were seemingly endless, with residents saying to each other, "If you can't find it, you can start it," said Ruther, who wouldn't give her age but acknowledged she is a "senior."

So, Ruther and some friends started the Columbia Film Society, showing foreign movies at Slayton House. The groups still shows movies at Howard Community College.

"It was a beginning, and everything was new, and everyone was coming from somewhere else, so they were very friendly because there were no cliques," said Ruther, who was a representative on the Columbia Council for Town Center, where she lives, from 1974 to 1977. "You couldn't be in a clique because nobody was there [previously]."

And it was much quieter.

A photograph of one of Ruther's sons shows him as the only person in the Bryant Woods pool. That would be considered a luxury today, when many of Columbia's pools overflow with swimmers.

Ruther and her husband used to take walks along Governor Warfield Parkway, which now roars with traffic. "I remember we found a big box turtle down there," she said.

The open values of the new community were tested in its second year when former Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace scheduled a rally at Merriweather Post Pavilion in the summer of 1968.

Many Columbia residents didn't want Wallace, an avid segregationist then making a third-party bid for the presidency, to come to Columbia. They feared that the people the rally would attract would tarnish Columbia's image.

"It was not fashionable to be a bigot here," Ruther said. "Everyone espoused a more accepting view of the world."

But in a meeting at Slayton House, community leaders, including Rouse, told residents that trying to keep Wallace out was not the solution because Columbia accepts all points of view, Russell said.

"We all sang 'We Shall Overcome,'" Russell said. "Everybody joined hands. It was a very emotional experience, and it was a real bonding experience."

Today, the nearly completed unincorporated town has more then 95,000 residents in 10 villages and has 27 swimming pools. More than 4,700 acres have been reserved for parks, playgrounds and natural areas. Pathways for running, biking or walking take up 80 miles.

The Columbia Association -- one of the nation's largest homeowners associations -- offers arts and culture programs, before- and after-school care for children, summer day camps and a number of other activities for residents.

But as the community has aged some of Columbia's distinctive features have become fodder for humor, and the community's residents have discovered that good intentions don't provide a permanent cure for stubborn social problems.

Newcomers complain that everything is neatly hidden behind trees and grassy berms, making it nearly impossible for them to find a gas station or grocery store. Even the mall is camouflaged.

The street names are weird, such as Painted Yellow Gate, Tree Swallow Court or Ascending Moon Path, with many of the 1,000-plus streets named after literary and artistic works.

And fierce debates in the Columbia Council -- the governing body for the homeowners association -- can be embarrassing. Infighting, name calling and personal accusations have troubled the council for years.

"They have been a fiasco," said Bennett, who complained that the council spends too much time thinking about long-term goals instead of addressing immediate concerns.

Crime affects some Columbia neighborhoods. Older residents complain about intimidating groups of young people blocking their way when they attempt to shop at the Oakland Mills village center.

Revitalization efforts are under way in older neighborhoods such as Bryant Square, where aging infrastructure and housing need repairs.

And the original vision of social and economic diversity has virtually disappeared in some Columbia neighborhoods.

Columbia's newest village, River Hill, begun about 10 years ago, has only upscale houses, while Wilde Lake's housing ranges from Section 8 apartments to high-end, single-family houses.

Eileen Henderson -- who moved to the area in 1967 with her husband, Charles, a pharmacist -- worries that a high demand for housing in Columbia is pushing prices so high that young people cannot afford to live in the community.

Columbia's single-family homes range in price from $160,000 to more than $1 million.

"Columbia is in some ways the victim of its own success," said Henderson, who said she is in her 70s. "Its own successes created some of the problems it did not anticipate."

Diversity is lacking at River Hill High School, where 78 percent of the students are white, 6 percent are black, 15 percent are Asian and 1 percent are Hispanic.

In contrast, about half of the students -- 53 percent -- at Wilde Lake High School are white. Black students make up 36 percent, while 8 percent are Asian and 3 percent are Hispanic.

Bennett said he thinks different races are now more separated throughout Columbia -- he can see it in the way schoolchildren walk mainly with kids of similar race.

Vision of paradise

But to the pioneers, Columbia is still their best version of paradise. And while they hold steadfast to the ideals that attracted them to the area, they have also grown used to newcomers who don't necessarily share the same vision.

Henderson said she thinks many people new to the area don't have a "strong social conscience," which many of the pioneers had with their commitment to racial integration. Now, she said, people have other concerns and have busier lives.

"I don't know how you can change that unless you can have everyone come to an orientation before they are allowed to move in," she said. "And that can't happen."

Ruther said she thinks more people are coming to Columbia for the location -- between Baltimore and Washington -- and for property values and schools. They're not necessarily looking to make a statement by living in an open community, as Ruther and her husband, Martin, did.

"I guess that's not unusual, as the community grows," she said. "All 95,000 people didn't come because of Rouse's visions."

Louis Leslie, 47, said he and his family moved to Columbia six months ago primarily because of the schools and the convenient location. His wife, Linda, works in Columbia, and he works in Washington.

"If this would have been Ellicott City, we would have been just as happy with Ellicott City," Leslie said.

'We all have gifts'

However, Martin said Columbia turned out "95 percent" of the way he envisioned. His three sons benefited greatly from the diverse community, he said. Their playmates and classmates included a mix of kids, allowing them to learn from each other.

"They can also learn that we all have gifts, and that doesn't depend on race," he said. "And I think in some places that doesn't always happen, and I think that our children know that."

Martin said many of Columbia's residents preserve the community's founding ideals -- his street holds block parties almost every year.

"The people who are still here helped generate that and keep it going to be an open community," he said.

Patty Rouse said she thinks her late husband would be proud of today's Columbia. Before he died, he bragged that the community has the largest proportion of interracial marriages in the world.

She said he would be especially touched that a number of people who live in the community want to live out their lives there, adding that she plans on staying in her Wilde Lake home "as long as I'm alive."

"I think Columbia is really a good example of what society can be," she said. "As Jim used to say, 'What ought to be can be with the will to make it so,' and he had the will to make this happen."

Sun researcher Sheila Jackson contributed to this article.