Downtown

Downtown is a term primarily used in North America by English-speakers to refer to a city's core or central business district CBD , often in a geographical or commercial sense. The term is not generally used in British English , whose speakers instead use the term city centre.

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The term "downtown" is thought to have been coined in New York City , where it was in use by the s to refer to the original town at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan. During 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.

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. 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 , downtown was in the center of the city.

Notably, "downtown" was not included in dictionaries as late as the s. Even as late as early part of the 20th century, English travel writers felt it necessary to explain to their readers what "downtown" meant. 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 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 the theatres, clubs, cabarets, and dance halls, and where skyscrapers were built once that technology was perfected. It was also frequently, at first, the only part of a city that was electrified. It was also the place where street congestion was the worst, a problem for which a solution was never really found. But most of all, downtown was the place where the city did its business. 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.

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. 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. The skyscraper would become the hallmark of the downtown area. Prior to the invention of the elevator — and later the high-speed elevator — buildings were limited in height to about six stories, which was a de facto limit set by the amount of stairs it was assumed that people would climb, but with the elevator, that limit was shattered, and buildings began to be constructed up to about sixteen stories.

What limited them then was the thickness of the masonry needed at the base to hold the weight of the building above it. As the buildings got taller, the thickness of the masonry and the space needed for elevators did not allow for sufficient rentable space to make the building profitable.

What shattered that restriction was the invention of first the iron- and then the steel frame building, in which the building's load was carried by an internal metal frame skeleton, which the masonry — and later glass — simply hung off of without carrying any weight. Although first used in Chicago, the steel-framed skyscraper caught on most quickly in New York City in the s, and from there spread to most other American cities in the s and s. The apparent lack of a height limitation of this type of building set off a fervent debate over whether their height should be restricted by law, with proponents and opponents of height limits bringing out numerous arguments in favor of their position.

The question of height limits also had a profound implication for the nature of downtown itself: By the s, most of the largest and medium-sized cities had height limits in effect, with New York — despite several concerted efforts to enact them, Philadelphia, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Minneapolis being notable holdouts. Ultimately, though, it would not be height limits per se that restricted skyscrapers, but comprehensive zoning laws which would set up separate requirements for different parts of a city, and would regulate not only height, but also a building's volume, the percentage of the lot used, and the amount of light the building blocked, and would also encourage setbacks to reduce a building's bulk by allowing additional height per foot of setback — the exact amount depending on what zone the building was in.

New York City was the first to do this, with the Zoning Resolution , which was prompted in good part by the construction of the Equitable Building in , a story building with straight sides and no setbacks, which raised fears of the downtown area become a maze of dark streets which never saw the sun. What was worse, at least to real estate interests, the building dumped 1. To many in the real estate industry, the zoning law was an example of a "reasonable restriction.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the downtown area was the business district of the American city, but beginning around the s and s, as cities continued to grow in size and population, rival business districts began to appear outside of downtown in outlying districts.

This was the time when the term " central business district " began to appear as more-or-less synonymous with the downtown area. The phrase acknowledged the existence of other business districts in the city, but allocated to downtown the primacy of being "central", not only geographically, in many cities, but also in importance. 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.

Real estate interests were particularly concerned about the tendency of downtown to move because the downtown area had by far the highest land values in each city.

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. The same relationship was true in St. 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. One way in which downtown changed from the late 19th century to the early part of the 20th century was that industrial concerns began to leave downtown and move to the periphery of the city, which meant that downtown's businesses were chiefly part of the burgeoning service sector.

Brand new firms followed the older ones, and never came to downtown, settling at the edges of the city or the urban area. Industrial districts developed in these areas, which were sometimes specifically zoned for manufacturing. 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.

As a result of this migration, manufacturing was no longer a significant part of the downtown mix of businesses. Another sector which began to move away from downtown even before the turn of the 20th century were the great cultural institutions: Not only was the high cost of land downtown a factor, but these institutions wanted larger plots of land than were available there, so that their buildings could themselves be easily perceived as works of art. 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.

The loss of the major cultural institutions left downtown as a place primarily dedicated to business, but the loss of another sector, retail shopping, defined the type of business that was done there. The great retail outlets like the department stores had always had the tendency to move closer to the residential districts, to make it easier for their customers to get to them, but after they started to congregate in secondary business districts on the periphery of the city.

The growth of chain stores such as J.

Woolworth , Kresge and W. Grant , contributed to the increased importance of the outlying shopping districts, which began outselling those retail stores which had remained in the central business district, and provoked those stores to open branches in the secondary districts in attempt to go to where there customers were instead of having them come downtown to them.

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.

By the late s, movie houses outside of downtown far outnumbered those in the central district. 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.

With the loss of manufacturing, the major cultural institutions, much of the retail shopping in the city, and its loss of status as the entertainment center, the nature of downtown had changed considerably. 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.

Its daytime population was not keeping pace with the population growth of the city around it, and property values, while continuing to rise, were not rising as fast as those in the secondary business districts. Downtown was still the central business district, and was still the most important area for doing business and commerce, but it was no longer as dominant as it once was.

The causes of decentralization, which decreased the importance of downtown in the life of American cities, has 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.

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As much as people disagreed about what caused decentralization, they were even less in agreement about how decentralization would affect the central business district, with opinions varying all the way from the belief that it would diminish downtown sufficiently that it would eventually consist of only offices and the headquarters of corporate giants, to the belief that decentralization would lead to the perhaps deserved death of downtown entirely as unnecessary, a victim on its untameable traffic congestion.

In between were those who saw a diminishment of the area's influence, but not sufficiently enough to prevent it from remaining the "Sun" that the outlying business districts revolved around. Because of the fire the city had to be built at a much higher elevation to avoid past drainage problems and regraded some of the city's hills starting somewhere around Seattle became an industrial hub in when the Klondike Gold Rush made the city a gateway for discovering gold. Starting in the late s, Downtown has been being filled with dozens of skyscrapers and most famously for changing the Seattle skyline, the Columbia Center in With about 65, now living in Seattle's core neighborhoods in , Downtown Seattle's population is growing.

Downtown saw a 10 percent increase in the number of occupied housing units and an 8 percent increase in population between and , outpacing growth in the city as a whole. In , building heights in Downtown and adjoining Seattle suburbs were tightly restricted following a voter initiative. These restrictions were dramatically loosened in , leading to the increase in Downtown high-rise construction. This policy change has divided commentators between those who support the increased density and those who criticize it as "Manhattanization.

Downtown Seattle is the largest employment center in the Puget Sound region , with an estimated employee population of , in , accounting for half of the city's jobs and 21 percent of King County jobs. A large number of bus lines also run through, with the ones operated by Metro previously being free of charge while in the now defunct Ride Free Area ; [16] other buses from the suburbs operated by Sound Transit Express and Community Transit also terminate in downtown.

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