City Lit: The War on Cities

Anyone who has a hand in shaping New York's future should read Robert Fogelson's meticulously researched Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950, which could easily have been titled How to Screw up Downtown, Accelerate Decentralization, and Engineer the Collapse of the American City.

Fogelson, an urban historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, certainly didn't intend to draw any parallels between New York's current crisis and the dire straits confronting American cities over half a century ago. His book was completed before the World Trade Center disaster, and his subject is the quintessential downtown that gave rise to urban America.

Nonetheless, the lessons are there. As Fogelson recounts, decentralization and depopulation were the two primary forces that began eroding cities a hundred years ago. And those who were most desperate to halt them, in cities from Boston to Seattle, were downtown business owners and urban leaders. At the time, downtown-or the central business district--had emerged as an economic monolith, the kingmaker of the city. But as Fogelson lays bare, its very composition--the strict separation of business and residential neighborhoods--ultimately led to its undoing, and the American city's demise.

Fogelson vividly recreates the long-forgotten political battles and public-policy debates that shaped this outcome, carrying his narrative through department store magnates, transit planners, office-building owners, and highway engineers "and the elected officials to whom they answered."

Readers will wince at the missed opportunities (failing to fund nationwide rapid transit in the 1920s, when popular enthusiasm was there) and misguided schemes (building urban freeways, several decades later, that fed into downtowns, in the hope of enhancing access for suburban residents). "Urban redevelopment," or "slum clearance," as it was otherwise known in the mid-20th century, was their final masterstroke. By the book's end, it's clear that downtown business owners joined with policymakers and urban advocates to unwittingly sabotage downtown and insure the city's demise.

The idea of Downtown took off in the mid-1800s, aided by the rapid spread of railways. This improvement in transportation, however, proved a double-edged sword: railways enabled businesses to become geographically concentrated and made downtown more accessible, but they also allowed people to disperse over a wide area, a popular trend that urban leaders and downtown business owners did not fully appreciate before it was too far underway.

While the actual geographical location of downtown varied from city to city, what mattered most was that it became known as the place where buyers and sellers converged, a bustling commercial and entertainment area comprised of shops, banks, theaters, restaurants, saloons, factories, and hotels. "By the end of the [19th] century, if not earlier," Fogelson says, "downtown was synonymous with the business district virtually everywhere in urban America."

It was also producing the nation's first traffic jams and quality of life concerns. Hundreds of thousands made the daily trip downtown in Boston, Chicago, and other cities. In New York, a London Times correspondent reported that "half a million or more rush 'down-town' every morning and back 'up-town' at night."

The streets were clogged with railways and all kinds of vehicles, some carrying people, and others cargo. "On one day in the mid 1880s," Fogelson writes, "more than twenty-two thousand of these vehicles, or one every two seconds, passed the intersection of Broadway and Fulton Street between seven a.m. and six p.m." Sidewalks were just as bad. American Architect and Building News complained in the early 1890s that downtown Boston's sidewalks were "jammed to suffocation with pedestrians," many of whom were "elbowing each other off the sidewalk into the gutter."