Illinois Institute of Technology Impact of Built Environment on Car Dependence Essay

Downtown
Robert M. Fogelson
d o w n
Yale University Press
t o w n
Its Rise and Fall, 1880?1950
New Haven and London
Copyright ? 2001 by Robert M. Fogelson. All rights
reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or
in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that
copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public
press), without written permission from the publishers.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fogelson, Robert M.
Downtown : its rise and fall, 1880?1950 / Robert M.
Fogelson.
p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-300-09062-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-300-09827-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Cities and towns?United States?History.
2. Central business districts?United States?History.
I. Title.
HT123 .F64 2001
307.3?3316?0973 ? dc21
2001001628
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for
permanence and durability of the Committee on
Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council
on Library Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Frontispiece: Lower Manhattan from New York harbor
(King?s Views of New York, Boston, 1915)
To Donald and Dorothy Gonson
A man walking . . . can make the circuit [of downtown Boston] in
an hour with ease. The distance is hardly three miles. Its extreme
length is just over a mile, and its least width is but seven hundred
feet. This little spot may well be called the heart of the city. It is so
literally, as well as metaphorically. Hither, every morning, the great
arterial streams of humanity are drawn, and thence every evening
they are returned to the extremities of the city and its suburbs, as
the blood pulses to and from the human heart, or the tides ebb and
f low in the bay.
?Massachusetts Rapid Transit Commission of 1892
Contents
Introduction, 1
1 The Business District: Downtown in
the Late Nineteenth Century, 9
2 Derailing the Subways: The Politics of
Rapid Transit, 44
3 The Sacred Skyline: The Battle over
Height Limits, 112
4 The Central Business District:
Downtown in the 1920s, 183
5 The Specter of Decentralization:
Downtown During the Great Depression
and World War II, 218
6 Wishful Thinking: Downtown and
the Automotive Revolution, 249
7 Inventing Blight: Downtown and the
Origins of Urban Redevelopment, 317
8 Just Another Business District?
Downtown in the Mid Twentieth
Century, 381
x contents
Epilogue, 395
Notes, 399
Acknowledgments, 475
Index, 477
Downtown
Introduction
During the late 1940s and early 1950s my father practiced law in a forty-story
skyscraper at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street, a few blocks
from Grand Central Station, one of New York City?s two great railroad terminals. Five or six mornings a week, he left our apartment in the west Bronx,
walked a mile or so to the New York Central?s Highbridge Station, rode the
Harlem River line to Grand Central, and walked from the terminal to his
o?ce. Sometimes, on a Saturday or holiday, he took me and one or both of my
brothers along, probably to give my mother a respite. While my father caught
up on his paperwork, my brothers and I peered out the windows, banged at
the typewriters, and played with the swivel chairs. Before we could do any irreparable damage, he would take us for lunch to a nearby Schra?t?s, a chain of
restaurants that was popular with housewives like my mother, who regularly
went downtown to shop, sometimes with her reluctant sons in tow, to socialize with one or more of her many friends, or to meet my father for a play or a
movie. When I went to college in 1954, I had no idea what I would do for a living. Indeed, I had only a vague idea when I graduated four years later. But I
took it for granted that whatever I did, I would do downtown. And so, I later
learned, did my brothers.
Things did not work out as expected, not for me and not for them. Since
1968, when I started teaching about the history of American cities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I have lived in one part of Cambridge, not
far from Harvard Square, and worked in another part, just across the Charles
River from Boston?s Back Bay. I go to downtown Boston about once a month,
sometimes to shop at one of the two remaining department stores, occasionally to see the dentist, and once in a while to watch a play. I used to go to the
downtown movie theaters, but over the years all of them have closed. One
brother is a lawyer who went into business after two decades of practice.
2 introduction
He lives in Scarsdale, a wealthy suburb roughly twenty miles north of New
York, and works in an industrial park in Somerset, New Jersey, about sixty
miles away. He goes downtown at most once every two months?sometimes
on business, more often to have dinner with his wife (and sometimes one or
both of their children). Following in the path of millions of other Americans,
my other brother moved to Los Angeles thirty years ago. An oral surgeon, he
lives in Hermosa Beach, a western suburb of L.A., and, with two partners,
works out of o?ces in Culver City, Redondo Beach, and Westchester, three
other western suburbs. He goes to downtown Los Angeles, a ?fteen-mile trip,
once every year or two?or less often than he goes on vacation to La Paz, the
capital of Baja California, which is nearly a thousand miles south of L.A.
I have no way of knowing what my father would have made of this. He died
before I thought of asking him. But he would have had good reason to be puzzled. Born around the turn of the century, he grew up at a time when downtown was in its heyday, a time, as historian Sam Bass Warner, Jr., has pointed
out, when it was ?the most powerful and widely recognized symbol of the
American industrial metropolis,? a ?metaphor for the metropolis itself.? It
was a time when downtown was the business district, a highly compact, extremely concentrated, largely depopulated business district, and not the central business district, which it became in the 1920s, and not just another business district, which it became after World War II. By the time my father began
to practice law in the mid 1920s, most Americans went downtown to work.
And not only to work, but also to shop, to do business, and to amuse themselves. As Jack Thomas, a Boston Globe columnist, recalls, ?downtown [Boston] was where you ?rst saw Santa Claus, and where your father took you to
buy the charcoal suit you were con?rmed in, and where your mother helped
your sister choose her wedding dress, and where you bought furniture for
your ?rst home, and later maternity clothes, and then baby clothes, and,
?nally, with a sense of the cycles of life, where you returned so that your own
daughter could visit Santa.?1 A uniquely American phenomenon, downtown
thrived everywhere in urban America, even in Los Angeles, now regarded as
the archetype of the decentralized metropolis, where as late as the mid 1920s
nearly half its residents went downtown every day.
Three-quarters of a century later downtown is still very much part of the
American scene. Even those who seldom go downtown, even the generation
of ?mall rats,? are routinely reminded of it. Long before the Boston skyscrapers come into view, the signs on the Massachusetts Turnpike advise eastbound motorists that they are approaching ?Downtown Boston.? The signs
on Interstate 95 call attention to ?Downtown Providence,? ?Downtown New
introduction 3
Haven,? and, as if to underscore the point that downtown was not exclusively
a big-city phenomenon, ?Downtown Mystic? and ?Downtown Milford.? Every
morning newscasters tell us about tra?c congestion and weather conditions
downtown. And from time to time disc jockeys play Petula Clark?s ?Downtown,? the place where ?You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares,?
and Billy Joel?s ?Uptown Girl,? a girl who?s ?looking for a downtown man.?
Downtown regularly appears in movies and novels, on occasion even in the title. American reporters and other writers nowadays speak of downtown in
Baghdad, Bogot?, Nairobi, Shanghai, Saigon, Madrid, and other cities, most
of which do not have a downtown and most of whose residents would never
use the word. (That, however, is changing. So pervasive is American culture
abroad today that Madrid has a magazine called Downtown?a magazine devoted to ?Gente? [people], ?M?sica? [music], ?Cine? [?lm], and ?Moda? [fashion]. Paris has a restaurant named Downtown, or at least it had one the last
time I was there. An ad in the Brussels airport urges travelers to stay at the Hotel Atlanta, ?in the heart of downtown.? And a sign in the London Underground encourages passengers to ride ?Downtown to Soho by bus and tube.?)
But downtown today is not what it was seventy-?ve years ago, not as a word
and not as a place. Having lost its original meaning in the mid nineteenth century, downtown became synonymous with the business district shortly after.
By the late nineteenth century it evoked a sense of bustle, noise, and avarice,
just as uptown, the fashionable residential district, evoked elegance, gentility,
and sophistication. As the years passed, however, many Americans began to
regard downtown as declass?, even disreputable. Witness the many New
Yorkers who drew a distinction between ?uptown Jews,? the well-to-do German Jews who had been born in the United States and resided on the elegant
Upper East Side, and ?downtown Jews,? the impoverished Russian Jews who
had just migrated to America and lived on the squalid Lower East Side. By the
late twentieth century this distinction was deeply embedded in the American
mind. As Greg Hoblitt, a director of both L.A. Law and Hill Street Blues, told an
interviewer, ?we wanted to create something [in L.A. Law] as uptown as hill
street [was] downtown . . . as elegant and sleek and articulate and rich and
beautiful as hill street [was] ugly, inarticulate and bumpy and messy.? At
times this distinction has created more than a little confusion. In Charlotte,
North Carolina, for example, a group of downtown merchants who assumed
that ?uptown? was more ?upbeat? (or upscale) than ?downtown? managed to
prevail on their fellow citizens to call the central business district uptown
rather than downtown. Oddly enough, downtown Charlotte is now uptown
Charlotte.2
4 introduction
As much as ?downtown? has changed as a word, it has changed even more
as a place. Now only one of many business districts (and in some cities the
central business district in name only), downtown is no longer the place
where most people work, shop, do business, and amuse themselves. The
outlying business districts are. The downtown skyscrapers, the workplaces
of millions of white-collar Americans, are as breathtaking as ever. In all but a
handful of cities, however, there is more o?ce space on the periphery than in
the center. And in downtown Detroit so many old skyscrapers are now vacant, or nearly so, that a frequent visitor has proposed turning them into ?a
ruins park,? a sort of ?American Acropolis,? a proposal that was not warmly
received by Detroit?s business leaders. In most cities the downtown movie
houses, the huge picture palaces built in the 1920s, are long gone, replaced
by the suburban multiplexes. Gone too are many downtown hotels. The remaining ones, some brand new and others a little threadbare, have far fewer
rooms than the hotels and motels outside the central business district. Even
more astonishing, there are no longer any department stores downtown in
Hartford, Detroit, Denver, and Tampa. Even in Boston, Chicago, and San
Francisco, there are half a dozen department stores in the outlying business
districts for each one in the central business district. The decentralization of
the department store is one of the main reasons that the central business district, once the mecca for shoppers, does less than 5 percent of the retail trade
of the metropolitan area everywhere but in New York, New Orleans, and San
Francisco.3
Long the subject of studies and articles, downtown?s decline is now the
stu? of novels as well. In The Risk Pool, Richard Russo writes, ?Downtown
Mohawk had never been much to look at and was never exactly prosperous,
but it had once been whole, at least. No more.? Starting with the Mohawk
Grand, the town?s leading hotel, one building after another had been demolished and then replaced by the parking lots and one-story garages that emphasized Main Street?s ?gap toothed appearance.? Harry Angstrom, the aging
hero of John Updike?s Rabbit at Rest, looks at ?all but abandoned downtown?
Brewer and, instead of the picture palaces of his boyhood, ?packed with sweet
odors and dark velvet, giggles and murmurs and held hands,? sees only ?a
patchwork of rubble and parking lots and a few new glass-skinned buildings,
stabs at renewal mostly occupied by banks and government agencies.? And
speaking of downtown Detroit, at one time ?the very center, the heart of [the
city],? William J. Coughlin observes (in Death Penalty) that its department
stores, if ?still standing,? are ?boarded up? and its ?ne shops ?only a distant
memory.? ?What was once the throbbing core of the city now looks forlorn
introduction 5
and desolate, as if an enemy army had marched through and sacked the
place.?4
As downtown has changed, so has the way Americans think about it?and
about the cities of which it has long been an integral part. From the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth they assumed that downtown was
inevitable, that every American city, large and small, had to have a downtown.
Although a few Americans had reservations, most also believed that downtown was desirable. Employing a popular metaphor of the time, they held that
a prosperous downtown was as vital to the well-being of a city as a strong heart
was to the well-being of a person. Most Americans held a deep-seated belief in
spatial harmony too. In their view, rivalry between cities was natural, but rivalry within cities?especially between downtown and uptown, between the
center and the periphery, between the business district and the residential districts?was not. Lastly, Americans assumed that there was an equilibrium between residential dispersal and business concentration, that no matter how
far away people moved, they would go downtown every day, that the more they
went to the periphery to live, the more they would go to the center to work,
shop, do business, and amuse themselves.
During the mid and late 1920s, however, a few Americans began to challenge these assumptions. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, by which time
business in American cities had been decentralized to a degree that would
have been inconceivable a generation earlier, they were very much in question. And in question they remain. Today some Americans still agree with the
late Charles Abrams, a lawyer and leading authority on housing and cities,
who wrote in the early 1970s that the central business district ?is the city?s
principal magnet, its mainstay and principal taxpayer.? Cities with ?a pulsating CBD? prosper; cities without one stagnate. (Interestingly, this view has
supporters even in the many cities where downtown is anything but ?pulsating.? A case in point is Tampa, whose central business district has thus far resisted every e?ort at revitalization. Speaking in 1992, a year after Maas Brothers, downtown Tampa?s last department store, closed its doors, City
Councilman Scott Paine declared, ?You will not have a great city unless you
have a strong, vibrant downtown.?) But many Americans are skeptical. Downtown, as they see it, is neither inevitable nor desirable. Rather it is obsolete, a
late-nineteenth-century creation that has no role in the late twentieth, a bad
place to work, a worse place to live. In Los Angeles, one observer has written,
?nobody ?loves? downtown.? To the average citizen, ?Downtown [L.A.] is
something he and [hundreds of thousands of] other freeway drivers . . . are
pleased to hurtle by every day without stopping.? In Detroit, another observer
6 introduction
has remarked, ?I?d ?nd people who had their tremendous sense of pride that
they hadn?t been to downtown Detroit in 15 years and don?t [ever] intend to
go.?5
Lately some journalists and scholars have argued that downtown is making
a comeback. ?In the last decade, the downtowns have been going through
their most striking revivals of this century,? writes Joel Garreau in his celebration of so-called edge cities. ?From coast to coast?Boston, Philadelphia,
Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle?downtowns are ?ourishing.
Downtowns that no prudent person would have bet a week?s pay on twenty
years ago?Los Angeles, Baltimore, even, by God, Trenton?are back.?6 But
back as what? Some downtowns are doing better now than a quarter century
ago, when Edward DeBartolo, then the country?s largest developer of regional
shopping centers, told a reporter, ?I wouldn?t put a penny downtown.? Since
then other developers, often with the strong encouragement and ?nancial
support of local governments, have invested billions of dollars in the central
business district. But the results have fallen far short of expectations in most
cities, among them Los Angeles, about which author Ray Bradbury said in
1993, ?Downtown L.A. is nothing,? and Atlanta, about which journalist Dan
Shaughnessy wrote a year later, ?There?s not much to do [downtown]. The locals will tell you: Nobody goes downtown.? Downtown is more robust in other
cities, such as Boston and San Francisco. But even there, it is a far cry from
what it once was. At the end of the twentieth century, after several decades of
e?orts to revitalize the central business district, one thing was clear. Nowhere
in urban America is downtown coming back as the only business district, as it
was in the late nineteenth century, or even as the paramount and virtually unrivaled business district, as it was in the early twentieth. The almighty downtown of the past is gone?and gone for good. And it has been gone much
longer than most Americans realize.
Its passing has left many who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s or earlier
with strong feelings of nostalgia. It pervades many of the ?lms of Woody
Allen, who, decades later, can still remember his ?rst trip from Brooklyn to
Manhattan. ?I was just stunned,? he recalls. As for Times Square?with
twenty movie houses on one side of Forty-second Street and twenty on the
other??I just couldn?t believe it.? The sentiment is much the same in other
cities. ?Even in my earlier recollections, there was an aura of magic and pleasurable excitement about a trip downtown,? writes a longtime Baltimore resident. ?The countless downtown shopping or pleasure trips we took as adults
didn?t particularly seem imbued with charm and color at the time, but now,
knowing they are gone, they seem in?nitely endearing.? ?Everybody remem-
introduction 7
bers the way it used to be,? notes a Tampa journalist, ?the halcyon days for
downtown when a retailer could do no wrong and the cash registers never
stopped ringing??and when, a leading Tampa preservationist recalls, everyone used to shop at Maas Brothers, see movies at the Tampa Theater, eat
lunch at Newberry?s, and pay bills at the Tampa Gas Company Building. Even
in Albany novelist William Kennedy can remember ?the booming, bustling
Downtown Age, when the crowds were six abreast on the sidewalks at high
noon and all day Saturday, when all the trolley cars were crowded, and you had
to stand in line to get in to the movies or to buy two pounds of ambrosia,
which in those days came packaged as Martha Washington?s dark-chocolate
butter creams.?7
I feel nostalgic about downtown, too?especially when I visit New York and
remember going to my father?s o?ce, shopping with my mother at Barney?s
Boys Town, attending the New York Philharmonic?s Young People?s Concerts
at Carnegie Hall, and delivering ?owers for Wadley & Smythe on West Fiftyseventh Street, my ?rst job. But what drove me to study downtown was not so
much nostalgia as curiosity. For reasons that elude me, American historians,
who have written so much about suburbs and ghettos, have written very little
about downtown. So in order to satisfy my curiosity, I have written a history of
downtown that begins in the late nineteenth century, at which time its dominance was well established, and ends in the mid twentieth, by which time its
decline was well under way. It is about downtown, how Americans thought
about downtown, and how downtown and the way Americans thought about
it changed over time. The book is also about the downtown businessmen and
property owners, and especially about their e?orts to promote the well-being
of the central business district?even, if need be, at the expense of other parts
of the city. And thus it is about spatial politics, about the battles between the
downtown business interests and the outlying business interests as well as
about the battles among the downtown business interests.
To put it another way, the book is about how Americans shaped (or tried to
shape) downtown, not about how they felt downtown. Hence it is about
power, not feelings. And though it may be unfashionable nowadays, it deals
mostly with those with the most power. It is about department store magnates
more than about salesgirls and ?oorwalkers, about o?ce building owners
more than about elevator operators and dispatchers. And it is about transit
planners and highway engineers (and the elected o?cials to whom they answered) more than about straphangers and motorists. Downtown is not the
last word on the subject. If not the ?rst, it is one of the ?rst. Although it stops
shortly after World War II, I hope it will be of interest not only to my fellow his-
8 introduction
torians but also to the few Americans who remember when downtown was a
vital part of their lives (when it was, as we used to say, ?the city?) and the many
Americans who, in the words of one midwesterner, ?don?t remember when,
because for them, there never was a when.?8
1
The Business District:
Downtown in the
Late Nineteenth Century
Late in 1919 A. G. Gardiner, an English journalist and former editor of the
London Daily News, made his ?rst trip to the United States. As his ship
steamed into New York harbor, he saw through the late afternoon mist what
looked like ?the serrated mass of a distant range of mountains, except that the
sky-line is broken with a precision that suggests the work of man rather than
the careless architecture of nature.? ?Gradually, as you draw near,? he observed, ?the mountain range takes de?nition.? It turns into ?vast structures
with innumerable windows,? taller by far than any buildings he had ever seen.
?It is,? Gardiner wrote, ??down town,??
the business district of America?s largest
city. Here on ?the tip of this tongue of
rock that lies between the Hudson River
and the East River? stands ?the greatest
group of buildings in the world??
crowned by the Woolworth Building,
?fty-three stories of o?ces resembling ?a
great street, Piccadilly or the Strand, that
has been miraculously turned skyward
by some violent geological ?fault.?? Here
[To view this image, refer to
scurry the ?hosts of busy people? who
the print version of this title.]
carry out ?all the myriad functions of the
great god Mammon.?1 Here, said Gardiner, was the symbol of the American
metropolis and the immense country
that lay behind it.
By the time Gardiner ?rst set eyes on
?downtown,? the word was roughly one
10 t h e b u s i n e s s d i s t r i c t
hundred years old. But it meant something quite di?erent in the early nineteenth century. For New Yorkers like Philip Hone, a prominent businessman,
one-time mayor, and indefatigable diarist of the 1830s and 1840s, downtown
had a geographical meaning. When Hone spoke of downtown, he meant the
southern part of Manhattan Island?just as he meant the northern part when
he spoke of uptown. Here he was following the customary usage according to
which south meant down and north meant up. Thus when Hone walked
south from his home on Great Jones Street, then at the northern edge of the
built-up district, to City Hall, he went downtown?just as George Templeton
Strong, another well-known New Yorker, went uptown when he walked from
his father?s house on Greenwich Street, near the southernmost point of Manhattan, to Grace Church, then under construction on what was at the time upper Broadway.2 (A century and a half later Americans still speak of downstate
when they refer to Illinois south of Chicago and upstate when they refer to
New York State north of New York City.)
Already the nation?s largest city in 1830, New York grew phenomenally over
the next forty years. Its population soared from under 250,000 to nearly 1.5
million, and its economy expanded at a rate that amazed contemporaries. Together with the huge in?ux of immigrants, what a special New York State Senate commission called ?the inexorable demands of business? transformed the
structure of the city, turning lower Manhattan mainly into stores, o?ces,
workshops, and warehouses and upper Manhattan largely into residences. As
early as 1836 Hone, who then lived on lower Broadway, feared he would soon
be forced to move uptown. ?Almost everybody downtown is in the same
predicament,? he wrote, ?for all the dwelling houses are to be converted into
stores. We are tempted with prices so exorbitantly high that none can resist.?
Hone moved. So did Strong?s father, whose family was no longer willing to remain on Greenwich Street once stores, saloons, and boarding houses opened
up near their elegant home in the 1840s. By the 1850s the change was striking. Noting that ?Calico is omnipotent,? Putnam?s Monthly remarked that the
dry-goods trade has spread with ?astonishing rapidity over the whole lower
part of the city, prostrating and obliterating everything that is old and venerable, and leaving not a single landmark,? not even the ?dwelling houses of our
ancestors.? As Mr. Potiphar observed in a popular novel of the times, ?When
Pearl street [the center of the dry-goods trade] comes to Park Place [a fashion-
Previous page: The Woolworth Building, New York, ca. 1914 (King?s Views of
New York, Boston, 1915)
t h e b u s i n e s s d i s t r i c t 11
able residential neighborhood in lower Manhattan], Park Place must run for
its life up to Thirtieth street.?3
Although New Yorkers continued to speak of downtown and uptown when
referring to the southern and northern sections of Manhattan, the words
gradually took on a functional meaning that re?ected the changing structure
of the city. Strong, who had gone to work in his father?s law ?rm on Wall Street
in the 1840s, soon began to use ?downtown? when he meant the business district and ?uptown? when he meant the residential. And in the 1850s, Harper?s
New Monthly Magazine wrote of the ?down-town men? who ?slip uneasily
through the brick and mortar labyrinths of Maiden-lane and of John-street,?
two of lower Manhattan?s busy commercial streets. As men went downtown
to work, women went downtown to shop (and also to pay bills, to deal with
household matters, and, in some cases, to work). By the 1870s the functional
meaning had largely superseded the geographical. As Wood?s Illustrated HandBook, a guide written mainly for the British, explained, ?The expressions
?down town? and ?up town? are employed to designate the business and social
quarters of the city??one devoted to ?commerce, tra?c, and law,? the other
to ?private life.? ?If caprice takes you down town,? George Makepeace Towle,
U.S. consul at Bradford, informed his British readers, ?you soon ?nd yourself
in the very whirl and maelstrom of commerce and trade. . . . As you proceed
uptown, quiet and insouciant ease takes the place of the bustle and hurry of
the down town quarters.?4
During the mid and late nineteenth century the word ?downtown? spread
to many other cities, to large ones like Boston and small ones like Salem and
Worcester. The word ?uptown? also spread, though to far fewer cities. Outside
New York both words lost their original meanings. Susan E. Parsons Brown
Forbes, a Boston schoolteacher, wrote of going ?down town? in the early
1860s, even though downtown Boston was north of her home on Waverly
Place. After she and her husband moved to Spring?eld in 1866, she continued to make trips ?down town,? even though downtown Spring?eld was east
of her new home on State Street. Much the same was true in Chicago, where
a journalist writing just after the great ?re of 1871 remarked, ?As I passed up
West Madison Street, I met scores of working girls on their way ?down town,?
as usual, bearing their lunch-baskets as if nothing had happened.? Yet the
girls were walking east, not south. The words lost their original meanings because in very few cities was downtown south and uptown north as they were
in New York. Downtown lay to the south in Detroit, but to the north in Cleveland, to the east in St. Louis, and to the west in Pittsburgh. In Boston, a resident pointed out in 1880, downtown was in the center of the city. Uptown was
12 t h e b u s i n e s s d i s t r i c t
north of downtown in Cincinnati, but south of downtown in New Orleans and
San Francisco. In New York, a Philadelphia real estate journal wrote in 1886,
?everybody down town must go up town; here everybody down town can scatter to the four points of the compass.?5
By the end of the century, if not earlier, downtown was synonymous with
the business district virtually everywhere in urban America. When the word
?rst appeared in dictionaries in the early 1900s?it was not included in Webster?s Dictionary in 1881 or in Worcester?s Dictionary in 1886?that was how
it was de?ned. ?Uptown,? which had appeared in Webster?s as early as 1870
and in Worcester?s ten years earlier, was de?ned as ?the upper part of a town
or city.? But it was commonly understood to mean the residential section, especially the a?uent residential section. And it had already acquired the connotations of wealth, elegance, sophistication, and social prominence that
were still strong a century later. As well as a new word, ?downtown? was, as
Webster?s noted, an American word. It was virtually unknown in England and
other Western European countries. Well into the early twentieth century English travel writers thought it necessary to explain the meaning of ?down
town? to their readers. And even today the English speak of the city center
when they mean the urban core?just as the French use le centre de ville, the
Spanish el centro, the Germans das zentrum, and the Italians il centro. American reporters and public o?cials routinely refer to ?downtown? in cities all
over the world, but the word does not have much meaning outside the United
States. For downtown was not only an American word, it was also a uniquely
American place.6
As a place, downtown was hard to de?ne. Legally, it did not exist. Unlike the
city of which it was a part?indeed, unlike every parcel of real estate in the
city?downtown had no formal boundaries, no precise lines to show where it
began and where it ended. Nor did downtown exist politically. For governmental purposes, every American city was divided into wards. In some cities
downtown lay in one ward; in most it spread over two or more. In none?not
even in Chicago, where the business district and the ?rst ward overlapped
closely?did downtown and one or more wards have the same boundaries.
And in some, like Detroit, where each ward ran in a narrow strip through the
whole city, downtown and the wards were completely distinct. In virtually
every city downtown had some sort of physical boundaries, usually a bay, a
lake, a river, or, in a few cases, a combination of them. But nowhere did these
boundaries de?ne downtown with precision?except perhaps in Pittsburgh,
where downtown was hemmed in by