2/18/2024 0 Comments Dow nowThe skyscraper would become the hallmark of the downtown area. 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. There were hubs of business in other places around the city and its environs, but the downtown area was the chief one, truly the central business district. Inside its small precincts, sometimes as small as several hundred acres, the majority of the trading, selling, and purchasing – retail and wholesale – in the entire area would take place. Chicago's Rand McNally Building of 1889, the world's first all-steel-framed building, no longer extantīut most of all, downtown was the place where the city did its business. It was also the place where street congestion was the worst, a problem for which a solution was never really found. It was also frequently, at first, the only part of a city that was electrified. 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. Īlthough 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. 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. 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. Notably, "downtown" was not included in dictionaries as late as the 1880s. Uptown was north of downtown in Cincinnati, but south of downtown in New Orleans and San Francisco. In Boston, a resident pointed out in 1880, downtown was in the center of the city. ĭowntown lay to the south in Detroit, but to the north in Cleveland, to the east in St. In both cases, though, the directionality of both words was lost, so that a Bostonian might refer to going "downtown", even though it was north of where they were. "Uptown" also spread, but to a much lesser extent. Downtown Manhattan in 1893 looking up Broadway from Barclay Streetĭuring the late 19th century, the term was gradually adopted by cities across the United States and Canada to refer to the historical core of the city, which was most often the same as the commercial heart of the city. Thus, anything north of the original town became known as " uptown" ( Upper Manhattan), and was generally a residential area, while the original town – which was also New York's only major center of business at the time – became known as "downtown" ( Lower Manhattan). As the town of New York grew into a city, the only direction it could grow on the island was toward the north, proceeding upriver from the original settlement, the "up" and "down" terminology coming from the customary map design in which up was north and down was south. 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 town at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan. The Oxford English Dictionary's first citation for "down town" or "downtown" dates to 1770, in reference to the center of Boston. In British English, the term " city centre" is most often used instead. In some metropolitan areas it is marked by a cluster of tall buildings, cultural institutions and the convergence of rail transit and bus lines. Often times downtowns are surrounded by lower population densities and lower incomes than suburbs. Downtowns typically contain a small percentage of a city's employment. It is often synonymous with its central business district (CBD). ĭowntown is a term primarily used in North America by English speakers to refer to a city's sometimes commercial, cultural and often the historical, political, and geographic heart. Midtown Manhattan in New York City is the largest residential and central business district in the United States. For other uses, see Downtown (disambiguation).
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