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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."
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