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I think I saw youtube videos to this effect. Apparently these downtowns were walkable. It's just "urban renewal" that made them unwalkable.
I'm sure there's an urban renewal component to it. I would think the biggest reason these cities aren't known for their "real" downtowns is because most of them exploded into being during the automobile age. Land zone use especially from the 1950s-90's was much more suburban focused everywhere. That's why I think cities that were largely planned pre-1950 feel more urban in general.
The urbanization rate was simply not high enough to build large downtown footprints in the South. North Carolina was 73% rural in 1940. Which means a state like Indiana, which was roughly the same size in 1940, had over 1.8 million people living in cities. And NC had less than 1 million. North Carolina didn't become majority urban until the 1980s, by which time people wanted suburbs and malls. The downtowns suffered all over America, the downtowns were simply smaller in the South so it was less noticeable.
But also there was a trend to put highways through downtowns in the 50s and that ruined even the small footprints that existed.
While it was a much smaller city, in a much smaller county, in a much smaller metro area, Raleigh (and I imagine many others as well) had an active downtown with department stores, a movie theater and bustling business district through WW2. In the late 40s, suburbanization came to Raleigh in the form of Cameron Village: a 6 block car oriented shopping district about 1.5 northwest of the capitol building. Many long standing businesses in the city core were lured away from downtown and to the new shopping district as post war Americans embraced the car like never before. The irony is that today that very same center is undergoing densification in housing that's making it a much more walkable place, and many in Raleigh consider that very same suburban district to essentially be downtown now.
And let us not forget that some of the more urban, rust-belt legacy cities such as St. Louis, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cleveland etc. that had much more vibrant downtowns than we see today. In fact, no city, in my opinion, including New York is as vibrant as it once was in the 1940's.
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