Downtown

Downtown is a term primarily used in American and Canadian English to refer to a city's sometimes commercial, cultural and often the historical, political, and geographic heart.

[6] Some have posited that the term "downtown" was coined in New York City, where it was in use by the 1830s to refer to the original settlement, or town, at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan.

[9] But by the early 1900s, "downtown" was clearly established as the proper term in American English for a city's central business district, although the word was virtually unknown in Britain and Western Europe, where expressions such as "city centre" (British English), "el centro" (Spanish), "das Zentrum" (German), etc are used.

Even as late as the early part of the 20th century, English travel writers felt it necessary to explain to their readers what "downtown" meant.

[9] Although American downtowns lacked legally-defined boundaries, and were often parts of several of the wards that most cities used as their basic functional district, locating the downtown area was not difficult, as it was the place where all the street railways and elevated railways converged, and – at least in most places – where the railroad terminals were.

It was the location of the great department stores and hotels, as well as that of theaters, clubs, cabarets, and dance halls, and where skyscrapers were built once that technology was perfected.

And as more and more business was done downtown, those who had their homes there were gradually pushed out, selling their property and moving to quieter residential areas uptown.

By the 1910s, most of the large and medium-sized cities had height limits in effect, although New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis were notable exceptions.

Worse yet, at least from a real estate perspective, this new building created 1.2 million square feet (111,000 m2) of office space, flooding into what was already a sluggish market.

This was the time when the term "central business district" began to appear as more-or-less synonymous with the downtown area.

And in many cases, the downtown area or central business district, itself began to grow, such as in Manhattan where the business district lower Manhattan and the newer one in midtown began to grow towards each other,[Notes 1] or in Chicago, where downtown expanded from the Loop across the Chicago River to Michigan Avenue.

One commentator said that if Chicago's land values were shown as height on a relief map, the Loop would be equivalent to the peaks of the Himalayas compared to the rest of the city.

So when a downtown area started to shift its location, some property owners were bound to lose a great deal of money, while others would stand to gain.

There, land was considerably cheaper than downtown, property taxes were lower, transportation of supplies and finished products was much easier without the constant congestion emblematic of downtown, and with the improvement of the telephone system, the industrial firms could still keep in touch with the companies they did business with elsewhere.

[18] Another sector which began to move away from downtown even before the turn of the 20th century were the great cultural institutions: museums, symphony halls, main libraries and so on.

Public reaction to these moves was mixed, with some bemoaning the loss of a counterbalance to the overall materialism of downtown, while others, particularly those involved in real estate, looked positively on the availability of the land which the cultural institutions left behind.

[20] Entertainment venues also contributed to the decentralization of commerce which affected the importance and influence of downtown and the central business district.

Theaters, vaudeville houses, dance halls and night clubs had been primarily located in downtown, with nickelodeons spread throughout the city.

When film became the dominant medium, and exhibitors started to build movie theaters to show them in, they at first built those venues downtown as well, but, as in retail shopping, chain exhibitors such as Loews began to construct them in locations convenient to the mass audience they were seeking; again, it was a matter of bringing their product to where the people were.

Not all the movie theaters in the periphery were palaces, but some were, and the net effect was that downtown was no longer the entertainment center of the city.

It was still the location of banks, stocks and commodity exchanges, law and accounting firms, the headquarters of the major industrial concerns and public utilities, insurance companies, and advertising agencies, and in its confines continued to be built new and taller skyscrapers housing offices, hotels and even department stores, but it was still steadily losing ground as decentralization took its toll.

[22] The causes of decentralization, which decreased the importance of downtown in the life of American cities, have been ascribed to many factors, including each city's normal growth patterns; advances in technology like the telephone, which made it easier for business-to-business intercourse to take place over a distance, thus lessening the need for a centralized commercial core; the rise of the private automobile, which allowed shoppers to go to peripheral business districts more easily; a strong increase in streetcar fares; and the continuing problem of congestion in the narrow streets of the downtown area.

Downtown was just coming off a major building boom, in which significant amounts of new commercial and office space, hotels, and department stores had been built.

By 1931 there were 89 buildings of 30 stories or more in Manhattan, and between 1925 and 1931, office space nearly doubled; in Chicago, it increased by almost 75%, in Philadelphia by almost two-thirds, and by more than 50% in New Orleans and Denver.

[27] Another sign that downtowns were no longer as central to city life as they once were include the decreased portion of retail trade that took place there as compared to the peripheral business areas, which profited by the growth of the chain stores, to the detriment of the big downtown department stores.

This has been attributed to reasons such as slum clearance, construction of the Interstate Highway System, and white flight from urban cores to rapidly expanding suburbs.

[28] Due to well-intended but ineptly executed urban revitalization projects, downtowns eventually came to be dominated by high-rise office buildings in which commuters from the suburbs filled white-collar jobs, while the remaining residential populations sank further into unemployment, poverty, and homelessness.

Many cities use the Manhattan model and continue to use downtown, midtown, and uptown both as informal relative geographical terms and as formal names for distinct districts.