Downtown : Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950

Downtown downRobert M. Fogelson Yale University Press town Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 New Haven and London Copyright © 2001 by Robert M. Fogelson. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fogelson, Robert M. Downtown : its rise and fall, 1880–1950 / Robert M. Fogelson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-09062-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 0-300-09827-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Cities and towns—United States—History. 2. Central business districts—United States—History. I. Title. HT123 .F64 2001 307.3Ј3316Ј0973—dc21 2001001628 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 1098765432 Frontispiece: Lower Manhattan from New York harbor (King’s Views of New York, Boston, 1915) To Donald and Dorothy Gonson A man walking . can make the circuit [of downtown Boston] in an hour with ease. The distance is hardly three miles. Its extreme length is just over a mile, and its least width is but seven hundred feet. This little spot may well be called the heart of the city. It is so literally, as well as metaphorically. Hither, every morning, the great arterial streams of humanity are drawn, and thence every evening they are returned to the extremities of the city and its suburbs, as the blood pulses to and from the human heart, or the tides ebb and f low in the bay. —Massachusetts Rapid Transit Commission of 1892 Contents Introduction, 1 1 The Business District: Downtown in the Late Nineteenth Century, 9 2 Derailing the Subways: The Politics of Rapid Transit, 44 3 The Sacred Skyline: The Battle over Height Limits, 112 4 The Central Business District: Downtown in the 1920s, 183 5 The Specter of Decentralization: Downtown During the Great Depression and World War II, 218 6 Wishful Thinking: Downtown and the Automotive Revolution, 249 7 Inventing Blight: Downtown and the Origins of Urban Redevelopment, 317 8 Just Another Business District? Downtown in the Mid Twentieth Century, 381 x contents Epilogue, 395 Notes, 399 Acknowledgments, 475 Index, 477 Downtown Introduction During the late 1940s and early 1950s my father practiced law in a forty-story skyscraper at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street, a few blocks from Grand Central Station, one of New York City’s two great railroad termi- nals. Five or six mornings a week, he left our apartment in the west Bronx, walked a mile or so to the New York Central’s Highbridge Station, rode the Harlem River line to Grand Central, and walked from the terminal to his oªce. Sometimes, on a Saturday or holiday, he took me and one or both of my brothers along, probably to give my mother a respite. While my father caught up on his paperwork, my brothers and I peered out the windows, banged at the typewriters, and played with the swivel chairs. Before we could do any ir- reparable damage, he would take us for lunch to a nearby Schra¤t’s, a chain of restaurants that was popular with housewives like my mother, who regularly went downtown to shop, sometimes with her reluctant sons in tow, to social- ize with one or more of her many friends, or to meet my father for a play or a movie. When I went to college in 1954, I had no idea what I would do for a liv- ing. Indeed, I had only a vague idea when I graduated four years later. But I took it for granted that whatever I did, I would do downtown. And so, I later learned, did my brothers. Things did not work out as expected, not for me and not for them. Since 1968, when I started teaching about the history of American cities at the Mas- sachusetts Institute of Technology, I have lived in one part of Cambridge, not far from Harvard Square, and worked in another part, just across the Charles River from Boston’s Back Bay. I go to downtown Boston about once a month, sometimes to shop at one of the two remaining department stores, occasion- ally to see the dentist, and once in a while to watch a play. I used to go to the downtown movie theaters, but over the years all of them have closed. One brother is a lawyer who went into business after two decades of practice. 2 introduction He lives in Scarsdale, a wealthy suburb roughly twenty miles north of New York, and works in an industrial park in Somerset, New Jersey, about sixty miles away. He goes downtown at most once every two months—sometimes on business, more often to have dinner with his wife (and sometimes one or both of their children). Following in the path of millions of other Americans, my other brother moved to Los Angeles thirty years ago. An oral surgeon, he lives in Hermosa Beach, a western suburb of L.A., and, with two partners, works out of oªces in Culver City, Redondo Beach, and Westchester, three other western suburbs. He goes to downtown Los Angeles, a fifteen-mile trip, once every year or two—or less often than he goes on vacation to La Paz, the capital of Baja California, which is nearly a thousand miles south of L.A. I have no way of knowing what my father would have made of this. He died before I thought of asking him. But he would have had good reason to be puz- zled. Born around the turn of the century, he grew up at a time when downtown was in its heyday, a time, as historian Sam Bass Warner, Jr., has pointed out, when it was “the most powerful and widely recognized symbol of the American industrial metropolis,” a “metaphor for the metropolis itself.” It was a time when downtown was the business district, a highly compact, ex- tremely concentrated, largely depopulated business district, and not the central business district, which it became in the 1920s, and not just another business district, which it became after World War II. By the time my father began to practice law in the mid 1920s, most Americans went downtown to work. And not only to work, but also to shop, to do business, and to amuse them- selves. As Jack Thomas, a Boston Globe columnist, recalls, “downtown [Bos- ton] was where you first saw Santa Claus, and where your father took you to buy the charcoal suit you were confirmed in, and where your mother helped your sister choose her wedding dress, and where you bought furniture for your first home, and later maternity clothes, and then baby clothes, and, finally, with a sense of the cycles of life, where you returned so that your own daughter could visit Santa.”1 A uniquely American phenomenon, downtown thrived everywhere in urban America, even in Los Angeles, now regarded as the archetype of the decentralized metropolis, where as late as the mid 1920s nearly half its residents went downtown every day. Three-quarters of a century later downtown is still very much part of the American scene. Even those who seldom go downtown, even the generation of “mall rats,” are routinely reminded of it. Long before the Boston skyscrap- ers come into view, the signs on the Massachusetts Turnpike advise east- bound motorists that they are approaching “Downtown Boston.” The signs on Interstate 95 call attention to “Downtown Providence,” “Downtown New introduction 3 Haven,” and, as if to underscore the point that downtown was not exclusively a big-city phenomenon, “Downtown Mystic” and “Downtown Milford.” Every morning newscasters tell us about traªc congestion and weather conditions downtown. And from time to time disc jockeys play Petula Clark’s “Down- town,” the place where “You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares,” and Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” a girl who’s “looking for a downtown man.” Downtown regularly appears in movies and novels, on occasion even in the title. American reporters and other writers nowadays speak of downtown in Baghdad, Bogotá, Nairobi, Shanghai, Saigon, Madrid, and other cities, most of which do not have a downtown and most of whose residents would never use the word. (That, however, is changing. So pervasive is American culture abroad today that Madrid has a magazine called Downtown—a magazine de- voted to “Gente” [people], “Música” [music], “Cine” [film], and “Moda” [fash- ion]. Paris has a restaurant named Downtown, or at least it had one the last time I was there. An ad in the Brussels airport urges travelers to stay at the Ho- tel Atlanta, “in the heart of downtown.” And a sign in the London Under- ground encourages passengers to ride “Downtown to Soho by bus and tube.”) But downtown today is not what it was seventy-five years ago, not as a word and not as a place. Having lost its original meaning in the mid nineteenth century, downtown became synonymous with the business district shortly after. By the late nineteenth century it evoked a sense of bustle, noise, and avarice, just as uptown, the fashionable residential district, evoked elegance, gentility, and sophistication.

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