Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert M. Fogelson is professor of urban studies and history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Downtown

Yale University Press

Contents

Introduction.................................................................................................11 The Business District: Downtown in the Late Nineteenth Century.............................................92 Derailing the Subways: The Politics of Rapid Transit.......................................................443 The Sacred Skyline: The Battle over Height Limits..........................................................1124 The Central Business District: Downtown in the 1920s.......................................................1835 The Specter of Decentralization: Downtown During the Great Depression and World War II.....................2186 Wishful Thinking: Downtown and the Automotive Revolution...................................................2497 Inventing Blight: Downtown and the Origins of Urban Redevelopment..........................................3178 Just Another Business District? Downtown in the Mid Twentieth Century......................................381Epilogue.....................................................................................................395Notes........................................................................................................399Acknowledgments..............................................................................................475Index........................................................................................................477

Chapter One

Late in 1919 A. G. Gardiner, an English journalist and former editor of the London Daily News, made his first 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 definition." 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, fifty-three stories of offices resembling "a great street, Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been miraculously turned skyward by some violent geological 'fault.'" Here scurry the "hosts of busy people" who carry out "all the myriad functions of the great god Mammon." Here, said Gardiner, was the symbol of the American metropolis and the immense country that lay behind it.

By the time Gardiner first set eyes on "downtown," the word was roughly one hundred years old. But it meant something quite different 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. (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 influx 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, offices, 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 fashionable residential neighborhood in lower Manhattan], Park Place must run for its life up to Thirtieth street."

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 reflected the changing structure of the city. Strong, who had gone to work in his father's law firm 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, traffic, 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 find 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."

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...