Jane Thompson, Designer Who Helped Transform Waterfronts, Dies at 89

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/us/jane-thompson-dead.html

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To imagination-starved American households that needed a dash of style in the 1950s and ’60s, and to moribund urban waterfronts that needed a dose of hope in the ’70s and ’80s, the designers Jane and Benjamin C. Thompson brought vibrancy and variety, colors and textures, and (nice) smells.

Mrs. Thompson made her mark first as the co-editor of the pioneering magazine Industrial Design. After marrying Mr. Thompson in 1969, she joined him in planning transformative festival marketplaces in Boston, Baltimore and New York, and in cultivating Design Research, his small but influential chain of clothing and home furnishing stores.

She died on Monday at her home in Cambridge, Mass., 14 years — almost to the day — after her husband. She was 89. The cause was cancer, her daughter, Sheila McCullough, said.

“Ben and Jane Thompson have made their mark on Boston,” Carol Stocker of The Boston Globe wrote in 1979, “and it is a deep dent in the city’s Puritan tradition of sensory restraint.”

Speaking for herself in an interview two years ago with Boston Magazine, Mrs. Thompson said, “We woke people up to the value of waterfront land for social, recreational and commercial uses.”

That may sound boastful. (Chicago, for one, had long been awake to its waterfront’s potential.) But the Thompsons’ Faneuil Hall Marketplace, developed by the Rouse Company, caused a sensation when it began opening in 1976. Phase 1 was set in the handsomely renovated 150-year-old Quincy Market, a derelict landmark that urban planners had earlier given up for dead.

Ada Louise Huxtable, who was then the architecture critic of The New York Times, said she sympathized at first with a distressed older shopper who asked, “Where the hell are the vegetables?”

“But the vegetables are there,” she continued, “and so are the flowers and the meat and the oysters and clams, as well as canvas bags and candles and crepes and ethnic food bars; they are there in the only context — elite, cleaned-up, skillfully merchandised settings — that will work economically.”

In the early 1980s, Rouse and the Thompsons opened Harborplace in Baltimore and the South Street Seaport in New York, which included a shopping pavilion on Pier 17 built with corrugated metal walls, maritime-looking hardware and fixtures, and shiplike decks and promenades.

“We were somehow composing with materials, forms, scale and details derived from the site itself,” Mrs. Thompson said in 2012, arguing for the preservation of Pier 17, which has since been razed.

Jane Fiske was born on Jan. 30, 1927, in Champaign, Ill., and grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y. Her father, David Fiske, was a magazine editor and an engineer. Her mother, Ahna Fiske, taught disabled children.

Her marriage to Paul Mitarachi ended in divorce, as did her marriage to John McCullough, with whom she had two children, Sheila and Allen, and two stepchildren, Gale and Jill. She had five stepchildren through her marriage to Mr. Thompson: Deborah, Anthony, Marina, Nicholas and Benjamin Jr. The children and stepchildren survive, as do three grandchildren.

During and after her college career at Vassar, from which she graduated in 1947, Mrs. Thompson worked at the Museum of Modern Art, sometimes directly for Philip Johnson, who then directed the architecture department. She became immersed in the world of design.

She and Deborah Allen were the founding co-editors in 1954 of Industrial Design, a groundbreaking publication whose pages look as fresh today as when they were laid out by the art director Alvin Lustig. (A gatefold illustration of tractor designs in the second issue was by the young Andy Warhol.)

Ralph Caplan, who became the editor in 1959, credited the magazine’s success in part to its having tackled subjects beyond product design, including architecture, graphics and interiors.

Mrs. Thompson, he added, was a fearless reporter. A designer who said he preferred dealing with Mr. Caplan explained why: “Unlike Jane, you never ask me things that are none of your business.”

She joined the firm of Benjamin Thompson & Associates in Cambridge as a planning associate in 1967, a title she held until 1987, when she was made a partner. Among projects nationwide, she worked on master plans for the Grand Central Terminal and 34th Street business improvement districts in New York, and on the redevelopment of Navy Pier in Chicago.

After Mr. Thompson retired in 1994, she began her own firm, the Thompson Design Group.

At Design Research, merchandise choices — including brilliant Marimekko fabrics from Finland — were made largely by Mr. Thompson. She gave sophisticated voice to his more intuitive philosophy.

“What Jane provided was what corporations all think they need: a mission statement,” Mr. Caplan said. “Ben seemed to know instinctively which taste would sell, and to whom. She took advantage of this and made Design Research closer to what you would think of today as a brand.”

Though the Thompsons lost control of the store, Mrs. Thompson and Alexandra Lange chronicled its history in “Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes.”

The Thompsons were also partners in the Cambridge restaurant Harvest, which opened in 1975, decades before the “farm to table” movement. Ms. McCullough said her mother furnished the restaurant’s vegetable bins and herb racks directly from her garden in Barnstable, Mass., on Cape Cod.

“Are you trying to give these people a sensual experience?” Sonya Hamlin, a Boston television host, asked the Thompsons in 1979.

“Damn right!” was Mrs. Thompson’s unequivocal answer.