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Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?
The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares
So go downtown
Things will be great when you're downtown
No finer place for sure, downtown
Everything's waiting for you
Don't hang around and let your problems surround you
There are movie shows downtown
Maybe you know some little places to go to
Where they never close downtown
Just listen to the rhythm of a gentle bossa nova
You'll be dancing with 'em too before the night is over
Happy again
The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares
So go downtown
Where all the lights are bright, downtown
Waiting for you tonight, downtown
You're gonna be alright now, downtown
Downtown
Downtown
And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you
Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand to
Guide them along
So maybe I'll see you there
We can forget all our troubles, forget all our cares
So go downtown
Things will be great when you're downtown
Don't wait a minute more, downtown
Everything is waiting for you, downtown
Downtown in New England implies the central shopping district as it was in 1960 before the suburban malls killed them. In Boston, Downtown Crossing had the flagship department stores.
Downtown refers to the non-residential and/or mixed use core of a city. In smaller cities, this can amount to basically the walkable commercial area. In larger cities, this is more of a central business district with a significant office component. In both cases, it tends to have a high concentration of hotels, museums, sports venues, and other tourist amenities as well.
Greater Downtown includes areas adjacent to downtown which have the same mix of uses. Often this area can also include university/hospital zones, industrial/warehouse areas which being repurposed, and largely empty parking craters. It almost always, however, excludes plain old residential neighborhoods, unless they're very small and protected from upzoning via some sort of historic designation.
Downtown refers to the non-residential and/or core of a city. In smaller cities, this can amount to basically the walkable commercial area. In larger cities, this is more of a central business district with a significant office component. In both cases, it tends to have a high concentration of hotels, museums, sports venues, and other tourist amenities as well.
Greater Downtown includes areas adjacent to downtown which have the same mix of uses. Often this area can also include university/hospital zones, industrial/warehouse areas which being repurposed, and largely empty parking craters. It almost always, however, excludes plain old residential neighborhoods, unless they're very small and protected from upzoning via some sort of historic designation.
The thing is, all of the "downtowns" of the major cities of the Northeast have residential districts right next to or interlaced with them. New York has plenty of apartment towers in Midtown; Beacon Hill sits right next to Downtown Boston; the southern third of Philadelphia's Center City - and a chunk of its northwest quadrant too - is largely residential; there are residences surrounding the District of Columbia's office core; Baltimore's toniest city-center residential neighborhood - the one with the Washington monument depicted on the city seal - is smack in the middle of the path from the city's train station to its office district and Inner Harbor. Chicago ditto, with North Michigan Avenue and the Mag Mile surrounded by apartment and condo towers.
Without those residents, those CBDs would be lifeless after 5.
Downtown refers to the non-residential and/or core of a city. In smaller cities, this can amount to basically the walkable commercial area. In larger cities, this is more of a central business district with a significant office component. In both cases, it tends to have a high concentration of hotels, museums, sports venues, and other tourist amenities as well.
That definition does not work in Europe, as I have already pointed out in the previous page, the modern and sterile business districts that is often associated with "downtown" in the US/Canada are often located in the suburbs outside the city centre. And yet, no Parisian would consider La Defense as "downtown" or " Central Paris". Same goes for Canary Wharf in London.
Also, as I have mentioned previously, London has an extensive town centre network. So, each "village" will have its own local "downtown". Some of these, particularly those that are classified as Major or Metropolitan, will be bigger than the downtown of some mid-sized American city. To learn more, check out below, which I have posted in a previous thread.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ilovelondon
London is a city of villages, or what London City Hall refers to as town centres. There are about 1,400 town centres within London, and at the heart of these town centres is the High Street (equivalent to the "Main Street" in the US) where two-thirds of Londoners live within a 5-minute walk away making the city truly walkable to live in.
These town centres are divided into 5 different classifications -- International, Metropolitan, Major, District, and Local. To give you guys an idea what they look like, here is an example of each type (from smallest type to largest):
Local centre: Belsize Park composed of Haverstock Hill, Belsize Village, and England's Lane
The thing is, all of the "downtowns" of the major cities of the Northeast have residential districts right next to or interlaced with them. New York has plenty of apartment towers in Midtown; Beacon Hill sits right next to Downtown Boston; the southern third of Philadelphia's Center City - and a chunk of its northwest quadrant too - is largely residential; there are residences surrounding the District of Columbia's office core; Baltimore's toniest city-center residential neighborhood - the one with the Washington monument depicted on the city seal - is smack in the middle of the path from the city's train station to its office district and Inner Harbor. Chicago ditto, with North Michigan Avenue and the Mag Mile surrounded by apartment and condo towers.
Without those residents, those CBDs would be lifeless after 5.
I said with a few obvious exceptions.
1. In NYC Downtown/Midtown are more cardinal directions than anything else. Still, the core area of Midtown (along 7th/6th/5th Aves) have a lot of blocks which have little to no nighttime residents.
2. IMHO neighborhoods like North End and Beacon Hill aren't part of Downtown Boston, just adjacent to it.
3. Center City isn't really a Downtown in the sense of most U.S. cities. It does have a CBD now - mostly in the northwest portion of it - but the CBD portion of Center City is relatively small because most office development flowed to the suburbs until the last 30 years or so.
4. I feel like DC has a pretty large and well-defined CBD area which (at least a decade plus ago when I lived there) got very dead after 5PM. It didn't really industrialize though, so it lacked the typical "moat" surrounding its CBD even during the bad years.
5. I think Baltimore is a pretty typical U.S. city, unlike the ones above. Downtown really is mostly non-residential, bu it's fringed by neighborhoods (Ridgley's Delight, Mt. Vernon, Little Italy, Otterbein, etc).
6. Similarly, Chicago mostly fits this typology. Most of The Loop has no residents, and River North and West Loop aren't much better. Most of the condo towers and the like are relatively new as well. In contrast, you have to go pretty far out to find the first intact traditional urban neighborhood (maybe Old Town?).
That definition does not work in Europe, as I have already pointed out in the previous page, the modern and sterile business districts that is often associated with "downtown" in the US/Canada are often located in the suburbs outside the city centre. And yet, no Parisian would consider La Defense as "downtown" or " Central Paris". Same goes for Canary Wharf in London.
Also, as I have mentioned previously, London has an extensive town centre network. So, each "village" will have its own local "downtown". Some of these, particularly those that are classified as Major or Metropolitan, will be bigger than the downtown of some mid-sized American city. To learn more, check out below, which I have posted in a previous thread.
Yes. "Downtown" was a term invented in the U.S., and outside of the U.S. and a few other countries (like Canada and Australia) I wouldn't use it. High Streets and Old Cities are not downtowns in the U.S. sense of the world. And due to historic preservation, the most "CBD portion" of European cities is often at some remove from the Old City.
That said, it's also the case that even in Europe, the historic cores of cities tend to depopulate, with residential buildings converted over as time passes to office space, hotels, and other uses which slowly empty out the area of full-time residents.
So maybe I should clarify a little my definitions. I don't have any issue with residential blocks, or even neighborhoods, being within a "Greater Downtown" - provided they are the result of relatively recent developments (e.g., new construction condo towers, or conversion of historic midrises).
But traditional residential neighborhoods untouched by urban renewal - with blocks dominated by single-family detached homes, rowhouses, or small walkup apartment buildings, with at most a commercial "main street" running through - are not part of the downtown area. They're just neighborhoods.
The term "downtown" derives from where New Amsterdam/New York first developed in lower Manhattan. Since area served as the entire city once and went on to be its true core all the way through the end of the 19th century and was the business hub for the city during these times, other cities called their CBD's "downtown"....even in cities like SF and Boston where downtowns are pretty much uptown in location. Notably Philadelphia doesn't have a downtown, its core famously being "Center City", but, of course, that is semantics since Center City is a traditional downtown area (even when nothing was allowed to stand taller than the top of Wm Penn's hat).
We tend (or tended) to see downtown as the CBD of a city and quite often that area was strictly about business...with nothing in the way of residential. Chicago's Loop teamed with life during the day, but at night it shut down (short of the theatre district on Randolph).
But, it seems to me, downtown has changed considerably in the last 50 or so years: even while our cities were contracting in the years after WWII, their core areas grew up....and more importantly for this discussion...out. And the central city expanded in the process.
We started to get basically "super downtowns" (the Chgo Tribune once referred to ours as the "Super Loop"). At one point, some ten or so years back, the CTA proposed a rapid transit line that would surround the extended core of the city, just like the Loop el did well more than a century before (for note: Chicago's Loop wasn't named for the el that surrounded it but by an earlier streetcar loop that proceeded it). The line would have used mostly various segments of both el and subway with two infills on the southwest and the northwest. The Circle Line never got past the planning stage. And during this time of increased growth of the cores, interesting things were happening.....the areas surrounding the original downtowns were gaining office, commercial, etc., space...and later in development (for the Chicago Loop, probably the 1990s as the earliest), the traditional downtown was gaining residents, particularly with the conversation of old office buildings into apts. and condos.
With all this, I think our concept of downtown is pretty murky in how we define it.
I guess to me, when I say downtown, I mean "core" or (on a twist on Philly's approach) "central city". And I tend to see the downtown area in rather extended terms, a true core where centrality occurs.
In Chicago, we have long given up the equation that Loop=downtown. The Loop may be the heart of downtown today, but in so being, it is merely another neighborhood like Streeterville, River North, South Loop, etc. that is part of the core.
So in my eyes, downtown is "core city", almost a city of its own (like London's?). My perception is probably extreme, but I really tend to see downtown/core/whatever you call it to be a truly encompassing zone. So when I look at US cities, I see...
• Chicago: where I tend to include everything along the lake from the southern tip of Lincoln Park (in other words: North Avenue) down to McCormick Place (Cermak Ave) and going east to west from the lakefront to the United Center/Medical center area) to be Chicago's core
• San Francisco: I pretty much give the northeast corner of the city to its core....in simple terms, everything east of Van Ness (the furthest west any cable car goes), and on a north/south basis, from the north waterfront (Wharf, Pier 39, Aquatic Pk) south to Mission Bay and UCSF's downtown campus.
• New York: this one is tougher as Manhattan has two cores, Midtown, and the one it replaced as primary, Downtown. But NY and Manhattan are just plain different. Manhatttan's linear nature created a different dynamic through a few north/south subway lines created access to transportation clear up its length. I realize in New York, the downtown truly is "downtown" but to me, if I wanted to delineate something akin to the areas I described for Chgo and SF, to me core NYC is the lower 2/3 of Manhattan.
But that's how I parse things and in so doing, I'm merely sharing my paradigm of downtown....which is neither right or wrong but simply my opinion. But my question here is....what is your opinion of what we call "downtown" today and, if you choose, what would you define as the relative boundaries of your city's core....or any city's core you wish.
This is easy....it's downtown....it's where things will be different.....
Thinking back to three cities I spent my first 30 years in, Omaha, Mpls., Des Moines, DT was an area that the cities began in. Main "ingredients" were the large retailer, Brandeis, Dayton's, Penny's, Montgomery Ward; banks (those old bank building lobbies were beautiful), and office buildings.
Around 1960 the large indoor shopping centers sprouted up. The demise of DTs was on the horizon.
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