Without doubt it is a cliché for a Boomer or an Xer to wax sentimental about Petula Clark singing “Downtown.” The word has always been magical to me. It evokes modernity and progress. Every major American city vests its identity and reputation in the silhouette cast by its cluster of downtown skyscrapers. Dallas beckened with the Pegasus logo. The Sears Tower in Chicago towers over Lake Michigan. From some angles, some of the giants of downtown Houston appear to sprout from the Pierce Elevated Freeway. These images are sublime.
Photo credit: Jason Villanueva, licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
Beyond the nostalgia and the dazzling architecture, what is downtown? Robert Fogelson offers one interpretation in Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950. First, Fogelson claims that “downtown” is an American word and an American phenomenon. I received my first object lesson about this during a trip to Mexico decades ago. Feeling only a little bit confident about Spanish from my lackadaisical study habits from school, I did recall that “el centro” means downtown in Spanish. Or so I was taught. But I was about to receive a lesson in both English and Spanish. Having awakened as the bus pulled into the city terminal in the middle of the night, I said to the cab driver “Voy al centro. Hay un cafeteria que abrir ahorra?” (You didn’t really expect good Spanish, did you?)
The driver dropped me off at a cafe, that may have been the only eatery open within miles. Getting out of the car, I looked for the tall buildings in order to orient myself in this unfamiliar city. In the dark, I could not see any illuminated buildings visible over the one- and two-story buildings in the neighborhood. I was certain I had said “el centro.” What went wrong? Where were the tall buildings? The cab driver had in fact taken me al centro. But “centro” is an imperfect translation for “downtown” in American English. Similarly with le centre de ville, il centro, and zum Zentrum. While these terms in Spanish, French, Italian, and German all refer to the center of the city, they do not have the same meaning as downtown.
However, this was not just purely an American phenomenon. To a lesser degree, similar evolutions occurred in other Anglo nations. HG Wells invoked the metaphor of “forces centrifugal and centripetal” acting on cities. The lighter material was strewn around the perimeter, while the weightier material coalesced in the center. What Wells observed in England played out in an exaggerated manner in the US. Sparsely settled subdivisions radiated toward the outskirts. The urban core fell out of favor as a place to live for respectable families. Neither did these respectable families want commercial properties close to their homes. If the plan was residential dispersal, but without mixing land uses, the jobs and businesses needed to be concentrated somewhere. Why not the center, since families were already moving away from it?
Fogelson provides another lesson about downtown as an organic phenomenon. The West India Company colonized the southern tip of Manhattan in 1625. The earliest form of this settlement was located in present day Battery Park. It was both a convenient and protected anchorage. This town in the wilderness grew economically and grew in population. By the close of that century the town had nearly 5,000 people. A few years before the Revolution, New York City grew to almost 22,000 residents. In 1800, over 79,000 persons lived in the city. By 1820, the city grew in population to 152,000 and to 242,000 by 1830. This drove up land prices in the oldest part of the city, closer to the Battery, on the southern tip of the island. Down the island, land was expensive, Up the island, land was cheaper.
Fogelson notes both a geographical definition and a functional definition of downtown. Geographically defined, downtown is the southern part of Manhattan, which would be found on a lower part of a map. However, this geography of downtown New York became associated with functional characteristics. This land grew in prices as population increased. Phillip Hone, mayor of New York in 1826 and 1827, noted this phenomenon in his memoir. Some of his former neighbors sold their “downtown” property and moved “uptown.” Eventually, Hone sold his home and moved uptown himself, “Almost everyone downtown is in the same predicament for all the dwelling houses are to be converted into stores. We are tempted with prices so exorbitantly high that none can resist.” (Fogelson, 10)
The words “downtown” and “uptown” are natives of New York. Yet “downtown” traveled quickly to other American cities. The meaning was similar, but not always equivalent with the meaning in New York. The functional definition was nearly identical across cities, but the geographical definition varied. The geographical definition of downtown in New York was dictated by the geographical characteristics of Manhattan. Once the initial area of settlement was established at the Battery, the path of least resistance for territorial and developmental expansion was northward on the island. The initial settlement of Philadelphia was located on the west bank of the Delaware River. First expansion pushed west toward the Schuykill River, but the amount of land between the rivers was limited. The second expansion pushed north from Central City into the Northern Liberties.*** Downtown Boston occupied the head of the Shawmut Peninsula. Bostonians, however, did not accept the natural layout. Over a few centuries, large landfill projects expanded the land area of the peninsula, filling in the notch used as a mill pond on the North End, creating a new large land mass on the south end, and filling in the Back Bay. These transformed the thin neck of the peninsula into the sloping shoulders of a weightlifter. Yet downtown remained fixed at the peninsula’s head. In Chicago, downtown lies to the east, nestled against the long waterfront of Lake Michigan.
Downtown is a symbol of urbanism. Perhaps it should not be. The early version of downtown was a harbinger of suburbanization. The later version of downtown complemented suburbanization, and the post-modern version of downtown was an agent of driving and sprawl. If the dry goods coalesced downtown and residential land uses coalesced uptown, this implies less mixing between commercial and residential uses. If urbanism is understood as highly accessible goods and services, then these bifurcating land functions inhibited proximity and accessibility. While 1830s New York certainly did not have sharply segregated land use, this seems to be a first step toward suburbanization. Of course, Hone was complaining about his move to uptown. Victorian moral reformers, however, imagined this as a feature and not a bug. New York, as the fastest growing and largest city in the US, usually anticipated many social trends. Around the same time, private companies experimented with horses pulling cars over iron rails to increase the comfort of passengers and ease the burden on livestock. As the same number of horses could carry a greater number of passengers, New York quickly adopted the horse railway, and as real prices for a ride decreased, riding was not a habit accessible only to elites. Although New York remained a walking city for decades, more residents moved further uptown. There were also more residents creating a demand for more land and more housing.
However, over the last century, downtown has been dying as an urban arrangement. As suburbanization grew as a phenomenon, the streetcar systems no longer effectively fulfilled its mission as a facilitator of subdivisions. First, they were too slow to cover the distances created by the ever-expanding metropolises. Second, even when the radial routes did reach, it created many underserved areas between the lines. Streetcar lines all started as private for-profit companies. They either needed to profit from operations, or they needed to serve some other profitable business model, such as acting as a loss leader for real estate developers. But when a real estate developer sold most of their lots, it removed their incentive for continuing service.
Often, we think of residential as sprawling and commercial downtown uses as urban and compact. In the US, however, downtown is the yin of the subdivision yang. Downtown makes suburban living possible. In the early twentieth century, as cars replaced streetcars for transportation over long distances between suburbs and downtown, a critical mass of automobiles choked downtown streets, especially in Los Angeles, the city which adopted the automobile quicker than any other. Cars did not only make driving and parking difficult, gridlock in downtown Los Angeles often stopped street cars in their tracks. Too many cars reduced travel by car and by streetcar to a crawl. Nor was there enough space to park these cars. The next stage of downtown was degradation and destruction. Some property owners tore down their buildings when rents were too low in order to avoid high property taxes. These were converted to surface transportation lots called “taxpayers.” Cities also promoted parking garages in downtown. Jesse Jones advocated for this initiative in Houston. Eventually, downtowns transformed themselves for the car so thoroughly that it left few amenities for people to enjoy. The parking problem solved itself. But it solved itself in the same way death solves disease. With downtowns hollowed out to maximize the number of cars it could store, there was less reason to visit downtown because there were fewer attractions. This is called the Pensacola Parking Syndrome.
*** (21 October 2021) While the survey of Philadelphia indeed defined streets and lots within a corridor of land stretching from the Delaware River to the Schuykill River, it appears that development first coalesced near the old port, and later followed the Delaware, both north and south. H/T @s_m_stofka
Scott Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1987.
Robert Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
Pete Hamill, Downtown: My Manhattan (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004).
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), Second Edition.
Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2010).