Downtown

To many in the real estate industry, the zoning law was an example of a "reasonable restriction.

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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.

Downtown (disambiguation) - Wikipedia

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.

Downtown Seattle

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. Others doubted whether decentralization had as strong an impact as it was credited with.

Positions were taken that downtown was a natural part of the evolution of a city, or the unnatural result of a de facto conspiracy by merchants and property owners, so the question of what decentralization would do to downtown became bound up with the question about the area's legitimacy. Decentralization also increased the incidences of rivalry between downtown and burgeoning business districts. In Los Angeles, for instance, downtown and Wilshire Boulevard battled for dominance, and in Cincinnati the rivalry was between the old downtown centered around Fountain Square and the one on Canal Street.

The diminishment of downtown by decentralization caused these battles to be between areas that were now more relatively equal. Like almost every other aspect of American life, the Great Depression had a major effect on the country's downtown area. Downtown was just coming off a major building boom, in which significant amounts of new commercial and office space, hotels, and department stores had been built.

In the s, , additional hotel rooms were built in New York, and from to there were 84 large hotels built there, an increase of hotel space by two-thirds. When the boom was over, and the Depression had begun to have its effect, much of this new space became unneeded excess.

Owners of smaller buildings who could not keep a sufficient number of tenants to pay their overhead, tore down their buildings, but wheras in the recent past they would have been replaced with taller buildings, now they became one- and two-story parking garages or ground-level parking lots.

These were widely known as "taxpayers", as they generated enough revenue for the owner of the lot to pay the taxes on it. Even with the "taxpayers" taking away commercial space, vacancy rates rose precipitously. Owners went into default, and downtown real estate lost considerable value: Department stores were hit hard; most managed to keep their doors open, but few made money. Room rates were slashed, revenue dropped, and many hotels closed or defaulted.

The slow recovery from the effects of the Great Depression began in the mids, decelerated at the end of the s, and picked up speed with the start of World War II , so that by the early s the country was for the most part out of the Depression.

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Excess commercial space began to be used, vacancy rates dropped, department store sales rose, hotel occupancy rates went up, and revenues increased. Despite this recovery, the daytime population of the country's downtowns did not rebound. With a few exceptions, such as New York City, this pattern was typical across American cities, and was tied to the slowing down of the rate of growth of the cities themselves.

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Cities in the US grew much more slowly than during any other period in the history of the country, and some even lost population. Metropolitan regions grew faster than the cities inside them, indicating the start of the decades of urban sprawl , but they too grew at a slower pace than usual. Downtowns also had less daytime population because people now went to the outlying business districts, which were closer to their homes by car, for their shopping and entertainment, to do business, and to work.

The increased use of automobiles over mass transit also damaged downtown, since the streetcar lines converged on downtown, while the roads went everywhere.

All of these factors contributed to the lesser recovery of downtown relative to the city as a whole and the metropolitan area. Another sign that downtowns were no longer as central to city life as they once were include the decreased portion of retail trade that took place there as compared to the peripheral business areas, which profited by the growth of the chain stores, to the detriment of the big downtown department stores Furthermore, the "taxpayers", which many people had expected to disappear once the economy improved, remained in place, and even increased in number.

Demand for commercial space was so light that it did not make financial sense to construct expensive new buildings, and banks began to refuse to make loans for that purpose, redlining whole neighborhoods in the central business bistrict. The typical American downtown has certain unique characteristics. During the postwar economic boom in the s , the residential population of most downtowns crashed. This has been attributed to reasons such as slum clearance , construction of the Interstate Highway System , and white flight from urban cores to rapidly expanding suburbs.

One textbook, in explaining why edge cities are so popular, stated:. It is hemmed in on the north and east by hills , on the west by Elliott Bay , and on the south by reclaimed land that was once tidal flats. Belltown , Denny Triangle , the retail district, the West Edge, the financial district, the government district, Pioneer Square , Chinatown , Japantown, Little Saigon, and the western flank of First Hill west of Broadway make up downtown Seattle's chief neighborhoods. Near the center of downtown is the Metropolitan Tract which is owned by the University of Washington ; prior to it served as the location of the university's campus.

Downtown is Seattle's finance and commercial maritime hub as well as its center of nightlife and shopping. The downtown shopping mall Westlake Center is connected to Seattle Center by way of a monorail. Downtown Seattle's Columbia Center has 76 floors, a greater number than any other building west of the Mississippi River ; however there are taller buildings in Texas and California by height. Smith Tower , in the older section of downtown called Pioneer Square, once held the title of tallest American building west of the Mississippi.

Downtown is also home to the landmark Pike Place Market , the oldest continually operating farmer's market in the United States and the core of activity in the area. After abandoning 'New York Alki' , the Denny Party moved across the then named Duwamish Bay in April to a low level marsh situated with a safe deep water harbor roughly located in the city's Pioneer Square district where they named their new frontier 'Duwamps'.

In the late s, present day Downtown Seattle became the main residential outskirts of the city. But after the Great Seattle Fire , the business district was moved here.

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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