Suburban shopping malls pretty much define local retail now, so it's easy to forget that at one time, Rochester had a fierce core of retailers who believed, heart and soul, in the importance of downtown - so much so that they devoted their time and reputation to it and, sometimes, risked their business on it.

We lost one of them last week: Gilbert McCurdy, a determined, important visionary, who died at the age of 87.

He has been out of the public eye in recent years. And even at the height of his community activism, he didn't seem to seek publicity or acclaim. But his contributions to Rochester were enormous.

McCurdy headed the family's retail company for several decades, and many of us remember its flagship department store, in Midtown Plaza, as a wonderful, welcoming place. Midtown itself, which opened in 1962, was the brainchild of McCurdy's father, Gilbert J.C. McCurdy, and Maurice Forman. They created that bold, innovative development to strengthen downtown.

While Midtown spurred the construction of office buildings nearby, and boosted the sales of the McCurdy's store, it was not, Gil McCurdy said in a 1990 City interview, "a good money-making venture." Midtown was an expensive development, and McCurdy's and its neighbor, B. Forman, "subsidized the mall," McCurdy said, paying back the costs over 25 years from their companies' funds.

Before Midtown opened, McCurdy's had two stores, one downtown and one in Greece. When the Greece store opened in 1953, sales at the downtown store took an immediate hit. And so, McCurdy said in his interview with us, the decision on another branch store "was to go far away" - to Geneva - so there would be little or no effect on the downtown store.

As other retailers started opening suburban branches in Rochester's suburbs, he said, "we felt that we would try to enhance our downtown business rather than going into more suburban shopping centers."

Not everybody, he noted wryly, thought that way.

Some critics suggested that McCurdy's should be heading to the suburbs "like everyone else," McCurdy said. "But we said, be patient."

Patience couldn't keep the downtown McCurdy's competitive, though. "We recognized we were not going to stop the other people, whatever our policy was," he said. And so McCurdy's finally joined the pack, building branch stores that competed with his downtown jewel. And in the end, sprawl and the suburban shopping malls killed Midtown.

In that 1990 interview, shortly after Sibley's downtown store closed, Gil McCurdy was still optimistic about downtown. McCurdy's was boosting its merchandise lines and working on its image. "We are nowhere near our peak sales," he told us. But he also said he thought retail was overbuilt in the Rochester area, and he pointed to Canada and its regional approach to land-use planning. "One reason Canadian cities are so successful," he said, is because in Canada, growth is planned and controlled by government.

Here, he said, "Henrietta is just as anxious as Greece is to see that they can get what someone else doesn't have. There is no real control over what happens."

"Somebody," he said, "should take a look at the big picture."

"Have you considered closing McCurdy's downtown?" our reporter asked.

"No," McCurdy said, "we certainly haven't."

Eventually, of course, McCurdy's at Midtown did close, along with numerous other stores. And now the bold, innovative urban retail center that he helped develop is being demolished.

Gil McCurdy couldn't stop suburban sprawl. But his enormous contributions to the community - and most especially to downtown Rochester - shouldn't be forgotten.

At the very least, he kept downtown strong as a retail center a little longer. His commitment and his optimism inspired many of us, holding out a vision of what cities can be like. And he surely must have been pleased, these last few years, watching the slow but steady turn-around in development in the downtown that he loved, and for which he sacrificed so much.