Last year a friend invited me to lunch at the Harvard Club in midtown New York. He showed up dressed law-firm business style and cast a cold eye over my outfit—black shirt, long black skirt to meet the Harvard dress code, black boots, and Navajo jewelry. “Oh,” he said. “I see you’re still working downtown.” His sense of downtown as hip and slightly insolent is entirely missing from Robert Fogelson’s new book, Downtown, which ends in 1950. (Well might you ask, however, whether anything was hip in the United States in 1950.)
Fogelson has set himself the task of writing “the first history of what was once viewed as the heart of the American city.” He believes he has traced a retreat from downtown as the premier business district, to downtown as the central business district, and finally downtown as just another business district. But the history of the American downtown is still being written, and it resists being plotted simply as a story of decline.
Downtown equals hip in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and many other cities in part because artists, actors, and musicians often move into the weakest spots in an urban economy—the only areas they can afford—and then reinvigorate them into a whole new life. With its highly segregated business day—an attribute Fogelson regards as essential to downtown—a financial district becomes perfect for those who are willing to live in odd spaces, eat in cheap restaurants, and come out to socialize at night when the brokers have gone home.
When terrorists flew two jets into downtown New York’s World Trade Center, they were attacking a symbol of financial power. What they were attacking, in fact, was Fogelson’s downtown of decades past, for downtown New York long ago yielded its financial dominance to midtown and to decentralized financial markets around the nation and the world.
Wall Street, a mere 1.6 kilometers long, still ends at Trinity Church, as it has since 1698, and the great financial names still shine on embossed brass plaques on important buildings. Wall Street is still the synonym in common parlance for financial power—the symbol that attracted previous generations of terrorists, such as the anarchists who, on September 16, 1920, exploded a bomb outside J. P. Morgan and Co. at 23 Wall Street, killing 33 people and injuring more than 400. (The scars from that explosion still mar the stone at Morgan Guaranty, the successor firm.) But Wall Street is no longer the Wall Street whose name was given to the precipitating event of the Great Depression—the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
Names change, and so do neighborhoods. But while downtown New York retains its symbolic place as the center of the globalized economy, it has in fact become something else—a charming, funky mixed neighborhood of great financial houses living side-by-side with tiny businesses, shops, galleries, restaurants, residences, and government offices. It holds some of the best restaurants in the city—some upscale and others astonishingly cheap—and has become a magnet for uptown New Yorkers. True, this is a far cry from the obsessively corporate, concentrated model presented by Fogelson. Which is fine—simply another stage in a neighborhood’s life—but Fogelson seems to think it’s sad and perhaps even fatal.
His first description of downtown in the nineteenth century offers a quotation from A. G. Gardiner, an English journalist, who made his initial trip to the United States in 1919. As his ship sailed into New York harbor, Gardiner wrote, the city resembled 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.” There in front of him were the tallest buildings he had ever seen. This was “down town,” crowned by the 53-story Woolworth Building. To Gardiner it looked like “a great street, Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been miraculously turned skyward by some violent geological fault,” a vertical “street,” the Englishman added, inhabited by people carrying out “all the myriad functions of the great god Mammon.”
I once worked in the Woolworth Building, which is indeed magnificent. My fellow tenants were mainly architects, consultants, lawyers, writers, and accountants; most of us would have appreciated a few more rewards from the kingdom of Mammon. Woolworth the building is a Gothic spectacle, black and gold, with extraordinary gargoyles on which Woolworth the man had the faces of his enemies—mainly prominent financiers— carved for posterity. As you hit the elevator button you can look up at what appears to be John D. Rockefeller as a grimacing gold monster. Woolworth already understood the importance of symbolism to downtown.
The evolution of downtown, Fogelson rightly observes, made plain the destructiveness of the American determination to keep business and residential districts strictly separated. In contrast, European cities tended to spread businesses and residences over pretty much the same territory, with the notable exception of London’s financial district, which shut down at night much as Wall Street did a century ago. When businesses and residences are side by side, streets stay lively around the clock. When they are separate, one is deserted when the other is busy.
Fogelson quotes Frederick Law Olmsted, the foremost American landscape architect and the creator of Central Park, as tracing the separation of businesses and residences to the “law of progress” and to a “fixed tendency among civilized men” to enhance the “cleanliness and purity” of domestic life, which could not be sustained alongside factories. The nineteenth century was, of course, a time of brutal industrialization and brutal pollution. Separation of industry and residences seemed to make sense, particularly for those who could afford to move away from work. Upper- and middle-class Americans fled to the suburbs and shut the gates to business behind them.
This separation was then institutionalized in zoning codes, beginning with New York’s master code in 1916. From the 1920s forward few Americans seriously questioned the wisdom of keeping businesses, including retail, out of good residential neighborhoods, or keeping residences out of business neighborhoods. The unanticipated effect was sterility (Olmsted’s “cleanliness and purity”) in many American communities.
Fortunately for urban downtowns, aggressive and often rather impoverished youngsters in the 1960s and 1970s decided they wanted to live in precisely the neighborhoods their parents had rejected. They defied zoning codes to do so, moving into industrial buildings in downtown New York, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other cities across the country. They converted loft buildings to residential use, opened coffee shops and cheap restaurants, used public transportation, and lobbied government officials for better public services. They did for cities what Homesteaders had done for the American West a century before. Every city that is economically strong today had young pioneers breaking down zoning barriers 30 years ago.
Still, for every American city that has a revitalized downtown, there are five with dead downtowns. And even the vibrant downtowns suffered immense loss and waste. New York’s Woolworth Building, for example, which today commands astronomical rents, stood nearly empty during the 1970s—a ruined beauty without friends.
Americans preferred suburbs. They agreed with Olmsted that the suburb was “the most attractive, the most refined, the most soundly wholesome” form of domestic life. And they abandoned their cities to sit, in Olmsted’s words, under “their own semi-rustic ‘vine and fig-tree.'” Americans wanted to own their own homes sited in their own landscaped plots, however small. But every civilization has required population density to support the arts, theater, music, dance. Without urban density—and the noise and dirt and aggression that come with it, as well as the wealth it generates—a society is unlikely to move forward culturally.
So where are we now? A good 50 years after Fogelson’s well-told story ends, the nation’s most important downtown has been devastated by terrorism. Many workers who are free to abandon urban offices are doing so. There’s some ghastly irony here. Fogelson called his book Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950. Had he written a book ending in the year 2000, he surely would have added something like “and rise again.” What is downtown’s future after September 11? The early signs are that New Yorkers, and Americans generally, are not ready to write its epitaph.
Julia Vitullo-Martin, a New York-based writer, is at work on a book about the American criminal jury.
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
