Jean Nathan wrote:
Can someone in the US tell me what you mean by "downtown"?
I have been told that in New York City, "uptown" and
"downtown" are directions, akin to "mauka" and "makai"
(which I've almost certainly mis-spelled) in Honolulu --
but "mauka" and "makai" are radial co-ordinates and "uptown"
and "downtown" are one axis of a Cartesian set. (Perhaps
some New Yorker can chime in to tell us the names of the
orthogonal axis.) One assumes that someone who grew up in
New York City would establish an "uptown" and "downtown" in
any large city he happened to be in, just as I want to know
which way is north in any small city I happen to be in.
In the rest of the country, "downtown" is the shopping area
at the heart of the city; in a county seat "downtown" is the
courthouse square and walking distance around it. In
smaller towns, it would be the main street and up to a block
in each direction of the streets that cross the main street.
(Hence "Main Street America" for the average joe.) But in
my dialect, referring to a two-block main street as
"downtown" would be a bit pretentious, and might be mocking,
as when I refer to the commuter-plane landing strip in West
Lafayette as "Purdue International Airport".
When I lived in Indianapolis, downtown was called "the mile
square". I still considered myself downtown when I was at
the library one mile north of The Circle, but there was a
pretty big park in between & I imagine that that was pushing
the definition of "downtown". All the really big stores
were within a block(one-eighth mile) or two of The Circle.
Starting in the sixties, shopping centers sprang up around
the edges of cities and towns, and downtown in the original
sense no longer exists. Some downtown areas have been
salvaged by cutesypoo shops that go broke when the start-up
money runs out -- somehow there is always another sucker
with more start-up money -- and some are covered with
metastasizing government buildings.
Of late, there seems to have been stabilization, and I no
longer notice empty storefronts as the main feature of the
main streets I drive through. Pierceton, for example, has
re-defined itself as an antique shopping mall, and all you
see when driving through it is reasonably-healthy
second-hand stores. (Also a noted re-enactor's shop, but
you need an appointment: they are primarily mail order.)
It has been nearly ten years since I set foot in a town
large enough to call a city. Those seemed to hang on by
converting to specialty shops, such as Lodge's Department
Store in Albany, New York -- last time I Googled Lodge's,
they had actually expanded. When I lived near Albany,
Lodges was where you went to buy underwear for your
grandmother. They also had work clothes for men, play
clothes for children, and cheap-but-good stuff such as
washrags made from irregular bath towels. (I'm still using
the washrags I bought at Lodge's.)
Anyhow, despite the present state of downtown areas, the
word "downtown" does not mean "down"; on the contrary, the
word still retains echoes of the time when a lady put on a
hat and gloves when she went there.
--
Joy Beeson
http://joybeeson.home.comcast.net/
http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/
http://n3f.home.comcast.net/ -- Writers' Exchange
http://www.timeswrsw.com/craig/cam/ (local weather)
west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A.
where
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