Why does every city in America have downtown?

30 comments

1. [Business](https://imgur.com/NUWIr58)!

   Seriously though…it’s business (and government and law). Those banks that have big buildings downtown aren’t catering to individuals, they’re catering to businesses who also have their buildings downtown.

2. Large corporate offices, government entities, tourism and convention venues (and consequently hotels) naturally tend to locate close to each other.

   For example, it often makes sense for a country to place an embassy/consulate office in a central location with close transit access to make that location convenient to access.

3. It’s a central business district op

4. I mean they would probably sprout up wherever city hall and government offices are placed.

   Part of it has to do with zoning. The other half is history where cities were much smaller and walkable. Downtowns would naturally form.

5. You need spaces for workers, conventions, hotels for traveling business people, restaurants and other amenities to serve these people. It just makes sense to put all of that in a central area.

   Downtowns also have people living in them, and pre-COVID many downtowns even in downtowns that haven’t been doing great were enjoying a bit of a resurgence. Center Township in Indianapolis, which encompasses downtown Indy, has seen continual population growth the last several years after decades of decline from the 60s-80s.

6. A more directly accurate term for a downtown would be a “central business district”. It’s just a centralized area where most major business in a city takes place.

7. > Downtown is a term primarily used in North America by English speakers to refer to a city’s sometimes commercial, cultural and often the historical, political and geographic heart. It is often synonymous with its central business district (CBD). Downtowns typically contain a small percentage of a city’s employment. In some metropolitan areas it is marked by a cluster of tall buildings, cultural institutions and the convergence of rail transit and bus lines. In British English, the term “city centre” is most often used instead.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown

   > The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for “down town” or “downtown” dates to 1770, in reference to the center of Boston. Some have posited that the term “downtown” was coined in New York City, where it was in use by the 1830s to refer to the original town at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan. As the town of New York grew into a city, the only direction it could grow on the island was toward the north, proceeding upriver from the original settlement, the “up” and “down” terminology coming from the customary map design in which up was north and down was south. Thus, anything north of the original town became known as “uptown” (Upper Manhattan), and was generally a residential area, while the original town – which was also New York’s only major center of business at the time – became known as “downtown” (Lower Manhattan).

   > During the late 19th century, the term was gradually adopted by cities across the United States and Canada to refer to the historical core of the city, which was most often the same as the commercial heart of the city. “Uptown” also spread, but to a much lesser extent. In both cases, though, the directionality of both words was lost, so that a Bostonian might refer to going “downtown”, even though it was north of where they were.

8. Downtown is comparable to a City Centre in most towns in Europe. A mix of corporate buildings, shops, historical spots and generally where some people go just to walk around.

9. It’s just where all of the local government takes place at least in the old days. To get business done faster, you would want to be near these offices for approving documents. Naturally every city builds outward. Different parts of the city are created. It’s the center location so like in the movies and popular songs. The biggest church and jail would be located there. Major cities these days move their offices all over and downtown can simply be the old reference point where none of those things exist. Basically down down would be “main street” which everyone would know and to go. Some towns and major cities have a beautiful downtown and others…you could get killed or robbed.

   I imagine almost every major city in the world have some form of this concept but just different names. Generically and understandably, the reference to downtown is the center/city center.

   What’s it called where you live?

10. Office towers are very rarely completely owned by a single occupant.

    More often, a company builds a tower with excess capacity and then leases individual floors out, knowing that if they grow and need more space, they can take back floors as needed. Whole floors are often leased to law firms, frequently those with a working relationship with the building’s primary tenant.

11. I’m not sure I understand your question. Are you suggesting that *only* American cities have a “downtown”? Do you live in a country without cities or towns? Are you asking why some centralization happened?

12. >If people go local branchs in their county for banking then why in downtown do they have all those big banking building. What is the purpose behind it.

    The US has a large and decentralized economy. There are thousands of banks in the US, just about every city (and many towns) will have at least one bank headquartered there.

    In Philadelphia, the downtown area is called “Center City”. There are several large corporations headquartered there, the largest being Comcast, which is the primary tenant in the two tallest buildings in the city.

    Do corporate offices not exist in your country?

13. Just because there’s a giant building downtown with Wells Fargo, US Bank, or Citi written on the side doesn’t mean that entire building is a bank. It just means the bank paid to have their name on it in giant, light up letters – it is an advertisement. The giant bank buildings in my city are full of all kinds of offices of every type with one or two floors – or maybe just an ATM in the lobby – actually being “the bank.”

14. The big banking buildings aren’t “banks” but office space for the workers of those banks. Also, many of these tall corporate buildings aren’t solely used by the company with its name on the building, but they have floors where other smaller companies rent office space. The name on the building indicates that its primarily rented/used by that company, and that company has paid for the “naming rights” of the building for marketing purposes. These big buildings are generally owned by a property company who rents the office space to big, medium, and small businesses.

15. You need a place to go when you’re alone and life is making you lonely. Where you can listen to the music of the traffic of the city and linger on the sidewalk where the neon lights are pretty.

16. Downtown, City/Town Centre, CBD, Central, Commerce District…all the same thing. Having some kind of centralized commercial area is common to many places around the world.

17. To answer why a bank would have a large building downtown: There are other departments housed in that building that isn’t related to what happens in the small branches. There could be a finance/accounting department, IT, marketing, upper management, etc etc.
    There are a lot of things in business that happen behind the scenes that customers and workers in stores don’t always see.

18. The terminology of “downtown” comes from the fact that the city center was typically on the waterfront of a port or river, thus the lowest point of the city or town.

    Not every city in America has a downtown. For example, Charlotte, North Carolina has an Uptown since the city center was built on Native American Trading Paths that intersect along two ridge lines.

    As for corporate buildings and businesses, they exist for all the back-end work that is necessary for those front-end branches that face the customer.

19. It’s the business/government district.

    The “ABC Bank” skyscraper in downtown isn’t a bank, it’s the banks corporate offices; although they may have a branch in the first floor lobby.

    That building will have offices for executives, operational departments, accounting teams, risk analysts teams, sales, marketing, etc. which support the functions of the bank.

    It’s also worth noting that one company doesn’t use all 60 floors of the building. A small company would probably rent out a half of a floor or even just one office, while a large company might rent out 3-5 floors. So an individual building may have hundreds of different businesses in it.

    For example The Empire State Building in NYC is the offices for over 1000 companies.

20. As a 20 year old tourist visiting LA for the first time back in 1994.
    Getting a bus from LAX to Downtown LA was ‘interesting’ ngl it was a dump, and I felt like I had a HUGE target on my back, when in to McDonald’s, didn’t buy anything and got the first bus outta there!

21. Downtown is the business district of a town. It is where you have banks, sure, but it is also where the stores are. You may just call this business district a different thing, such as “city centre”

22. Downtown refers to the business/financial district of lower Manhattan. Downtown/lower/southern portion of Manhattan as opposed to Uptown which is not a business district. Most US cities copied the language for their central business districts.

23. The purpose is that some operations are centralized. A large building might be more secure than a branch of a bank in a small town. Some activities might only be done at that location.

24. The big huge bank buildings you see in downtown areas of large cities are for corporate office space needed by the bank. Those house their employees who work for the bank in various departments like , management, marketing, sales, IT, Human Resources and stuff like that.

25. My city’s downtown is emblematic of a lot of downtowns in a lot of cities our size (150,000-300,000 people.)

    It was originally where government buildings, banks, office buildings, grocery stores, movie theaters, theater theaters, the bus station, train station, hotels, and larger multi-unit housing buildings were located. The rest of town was reserved for neighborhoods full of single family homes, or industrial zones near the train tracks. A couple smaller clusters of shops and businesses evolved in other parts of town but everyone had to go downtown to do most things.

    When a mall opened a couple miles away in the 60s/70s, downtown drained of retail shops and restaurants. The city tried to “revitalize” downtown by, for example, closing a street and turning it into a pedestrian mall; tearing down a LOT of older, under-used buildings (almost always replacing them with parking lots); building a big modern arts center and a library; etc. The city WANTED downtown to be the center of everything and full of thriving locally owned shops and restaurants and hotels full of tourists etc. But they didn’t know how to make it happen.

    Eventually the police headquarters moved to a different neighborhood. We tore down our old city hall but haven’t yet secured a bond to build a new one, so “city hall” is in offices all over the city. Which is maybe not the worst thing, but not ideal. We also need a new county courthouse and have trouble raising money to build it. There is much less sense that downtown is the center of everything. The hospital near downtown became much smaller and a big modern new one was build on the edge of town.

    Our downtown is in better shape now. It’s been a long journey. New housing is being built, new stores and restaurants are opening, etc. But it’s still a little bit rough.

    Many many other cities of our size have a similar story.

26. So downtown is usually the spot where we took the native American settlement and built a US city on top of it.

    Typically downtown is the oldest section of the US cities, most of them predate car centric infrastructure, and were organized around electric street cars.

    However many cities that experienced explosive growth after 1950 such as Phoenix don’t really have much besides downtown and a bunch of suburbs.

    But seriously almost every major US city was actually built directly on top of a native American settlement.

27. The reason there is a downtown, think of it like a main square in Europe where all of the shops and restaurants are, thats the purpose of a Downtown.

28. Business district.

    Mine is the state capital so it’s really needed.
    We’ve got a huge power company building, all kinds of banks and state government buildings.

29. All cities have a down town. Cities are big, so parts are more or less concentrated then others. The most concentrated part of the city is usually referred to as the down town. Overtime, this physical place shifts as parts grow or rot, and you get a natural “old-new downtown” dynamic.

30. Downtown is where the city originally started before it grew out. When people settled, that is where the town started and then as more and more people moved there, it grew out so hence the term “downtown.” Also downtowns also have shops down there too and shopping centers. Businesses also lease floors in tall buildings for their offices to employee their employers.

    Also, not all office buildings are in downtown, they are all over.