The history of urban downtowns, from booming business districts to abandonment and blight

BY SUDIP BOSE

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Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950
By Robert M. Fogelson
Yale University Press, 493 pages, $35

When I was a child, nothing was more alluring to my imagination than the urban downtown: a cityscape spiked with tall buildings. Perhaps this was because I grew up in a small midwestern town, hours from the nearest city. The closest thing we had to skyscrapers were three modest high-rise dormitories clustered together on the campus of our local university. But I always imagined that one day the town would grow into a full-fledged city and that department stores and office buildings and convention centers would shoot up around those dormitories, creating a skyline that could be seen for miles. I am reminded of this childhood fascination of mine in the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. In addition to the horrific human loss, New Yorkers who have gazed upon their skyline for years talk about how it has been marred, about how painful it is to see those symbolic, iconic buildings removed from the landscape. If the New York skyline is, as H.G. Wells described it once, "the strangest crown that ever a city wore," then the city has lost its two most prominent jewels.

It comes as something of a surprise, then, to read in Robert M. Fogelson's impressive new history of the urban downtown just how reviled the skyscraper, that distinctly American innovation, once was. And not only in Europe but in the United States, too. As these tall buildings proliferated in major cities at the turn of the last century (a process made possible by the transition from masonry to steel-frame construction), opponents decried the ills they thought tall buildings brought about: traffic congestion on the streets below, a decline in property values in business districts, a loss of fresh air and sunlight, a threat to public safety. But perhaps the most impassioned objection was grounded in aesthetics. Opponents clung to the idea of the sacred skyline, "a skyline," Fogelson writes, "characterized by an even cornice line broken only by the spires and towers of churches, monuments, and important public buildings. It was the sacred skyline, many Americans believed, that made European cities so dignified, restrained, and beautiful." And so the debate over the height limits of buildings, over whether cities should grow horizontally or vertically, had spread beyond New York to other cities by the early 1900s.

Fogelson, a professor of urban studies and history at MIT, takes as his wider subject the rise and fall of downtown, an area that was paramount in urban life in the late 19th century but that had fallen into decline by the middle of the 20th, thanks in good part to the decentralization of cities, the ascendancy of freeways and automobiles, and the emergence of suburbia. "Downtown is no longer the place," Fogelson writes, "where most people go every day to work, to shop, to do business, and to amuse themselves. The outlying business districts are. The downtown skyscrapers, the workplaces of millions of white-collar Americans, are as breathtaking as ever. In all but a handful of cities, however, there is more office space on the periphery than in the center."

As the American metropolis evolved, more and more people saw value in separating businesses from residences, with "a high concentration of businesses downtown, and a wide dispersal of residences elsewhere." No less a luminary than Frederick Law Olmsted cheered such a separation as a means toward a more civilized society, one in which the "cleanliness and purity" of domestic life were maintained. Who would have thought that this impulse would have led to our present-day landscape, a full-throttle realization of what historian Robert Fishman has called the "bourgeois utopia," which centers upon the single-family home in a gently shaded suburban setting?

A turning point in urban history came in the 1920s, by which time downtown was not the business district anymore, but rather the central business district. "Americans had a choice," Fogelson notes. "As well as the central business districts, they could go to the outlying business districts, many of which were only a short drive from their homes and had plenty of free parking—if little in the way of excitement. There they could patronize branch department stores, chain stores, branch banks, neighborhood movie theaters, and roadside motels and restaurants."

The decline of the city, its fall into blight, is a familiar tale to readers of this magazine. And so is the story of recent attempts to bring downtown back, to lure residents with shopping and sports stadiums and cultural centers, to narrow that century-old separation between the workplace and the home. Though Fogelson admits in this detailed and accessible book that downtowns are in a resurgence (those in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, the cities closest to my home, would be barely recognizable to anyone who hadn't been there in 15 years), he remains somewhat pessimistic. Downtowns today, he writes, are not "anywhere as immense, as imposing, and as awesome as the downtown of the future depicted in the New York World's ‘Pictorial Forecast of the City' one hundred years ago."

We may be a nation of suburbs at heart, but whether the horror at the World Trade Center will mark a renewed commitment to our downtowns or yet another retreat from them is still unknown. Can our city centers withstand being emptied out again?

Sudip Bose is associate editor of Preservation magazine.