A TALE OF TWO DOWNTOWNS

When people have to tell you that downtown is coming back, that it is exciting, you have to wonder: Why do I have to be told? Why should we care? Is there just a bit of whistling in the dark about this? A fear of the doughnut city, empty at the center, combines with a very selective, if not plainly invented vision of the past.

The classic downtown era of U.S. cities probably lasted about 80 years, 1850-1930. This relatively short span of urban history marked an era when enclosed stores eclipsed open markets and fixed-rail transport proved easier than walking. This “classic” downtown was an economic convenience that, from the beginning, hinged on transportation, particularly waterborne.

Los Angeles started breaking the rules about such transportation with its acquisition of a harbor in the early 20th century: Most big U.S. cities with classic downtowns have water transit close at hand. With its distant harbor, Los Angeles started what airports would be echoing by the 1930s. For if ever a technology was important to the growth of cities, while at the same time serving as a decentering pull, it was the airport. No more stepping off the steamboat or train near the center.

Just as we forget that Angelenos happily attached outrageously distant ports to their city, we selectively remember what kind of downtown actually existed in the brief “classic” era.

Do people want these historic downtowns to come back? Skid rows, dating from the late-19th century, were filled with cheap bars, flophouses and entertainment appropriate to alcoholics and adult men without families. Single-room-occupancy hotels for the poor are probably not high on the list of what people mean by “downtown is coming back.”

Want to go back a bit earlier, to the mid-19th century? The bustling streets celebrated by Walt Whitman were crowded with children selling newspapers, shining shoes, selling hot, roasted ears of corn and sweeping the horse manure away from the paths of adults trying to cross the street. Horse manure and urine, from horse-drawn street cars, turned to powdery dust in dry weather or a slippery goo in wet. The hot-corn sellers were usually girls under age 9. Newsboys often lived in lodging houses, sponsored by the more considerate newspapers. Fans of Horatio Alger surely remember his boy heroes who survived on the spare change of the downtown crowds. The adults who wrote about these children thought they loved the exciting life of the downtown streets. But they didn’t have a choice.

In early 20th-century Los Angeles, complained reformer Dana Bartlett, the “brick-built, noisy” hotels and “low groggeries” (which had the only toilets) greeted travelers to the city. He and other reformers advocated low-density, spread-out housing as offering “freer and happier conditions,” an antidote to the evils of a compact New York, with its “vast population” living in “dark, contracted rooms” high up in the air.

Tradition in a dynamic city like Los Angeles means change, and that includes what and where downtown is. According to Boyle Workman, the new Bullocks on Seventh and Broadway in 1906 was considered “far out of town.” The concept of downtown “energy” is meaningful but, in many cities, that energy bursts out all over, leaving the hulk of previous downtowns to be reused or demolished.

Reviewing major news articles about the “return” of downtowns, one begins to be even more suspicious. OK, we know Manhattan is booming. But Newark? St. Louis? Great Falls? Not to mention Pomona, Moorpark, Hartford, Jersey City and Washington? (When I was there last fall, Union Station--now an up-scale dining and indoor shopping mall, with lots of parking--was just buzzing. But outside, the site looked as if it had been abandoned at 6 p.m. on a Friday.)

Downtowns, as American call them, should have tall buildings, streets busy with pedestrians and lots of energy. The energy comes from everywhere: pedestrian walking speed (the subject of a whole area of research), commercial enterprise, entertainments, food and even some residents. The energy, in other words, comes from a mix of all those activities we call urban. You can see this in Manhattan and maybe San Francisco. That leaves an enormous number of U.S. cities where the traditional downtown is gone and has been for a long time. As the current show on Disneyland at the Armand Hammer Museum makes clear, Walt Disney deliberately created a fantasy version of a downtown in 1955: He knew it was not reality.

“Real” downtowns had been fading since the 1930s: If not for the Depression, they would have disappeared faster. The change in most U.S. downtowns came during the past century, aided by streetcars, motor trucks, buses and automobiles; by reduced prices on single-family homes; by increased real incomes; by electronic communication, the telephone, in particular; by the supermarket, and by the shopping mall.

When the outward residential drift began in the mid-19th century, it seemed to reinforce the role of the downtown. Upper- and middle-class families moved to large houses on streetcar lines and commuted to the city center to work, shop and play. They went downtown because they had to: The economics of location would not change again until the automobile made travel on the periphery easier than travel to the center.

Consequently, the centripetal nature of city life didn’t become noticeable until the turn of the century, when motor trucks allowed warehouses and other bulk-oriented industries to disperse. The workers followed. Then the stores. Los Angeles got its Bullocks-Wilshire and Brown Derby in the 1920s, both symbolizing that big-time eating and shopping didn’t have to occur downtown. And in the ‘20s, you could stay at the Ambassador Hotel.

Charles Moore, Regula Campbell and Peter Becker’s guide to Los Angeles reminds us that “Miracle Mile,” where a still-spectacular new downtown was built in the 1920s, was not, at first, a “miracle” but a “folly.” Didn’t the developers know that large hotels, office buildings, fancy restaurants and department stores belonged downtown? But the area’s developers realized more than 60 years ago that many downtown attractions could work just as well away from the traditional city center.

Did this area have the energy of a “real” downtown? Probably not, but people liked it.

There are two late-20th century U.S. cities with exciting, viable downtowns, one on each coast and each with geographic features restraining the century-old centripetal pulls: One is an island, Manhattan; the other a peninsula, San Francisco. There’s a theme-park element to each, for surrounded by expanding metropolitan areas, each attracts conventioneers and weekend visitors who return to their quiet homes stimulated and a bit relieved. The point is clear: The “real” downtown is a rarity in the United States.

Urban economists tell us there is a simple economic reason for the nature of the downtown. It has a locational advantage that, no matter what, insistently pushes its value, like its buildings, upward. All things being equal, the city center is closest to everything: people, goods, services, good things and bad things. No matter what, certain activities virtually have to be there: finance, high-powered legal firms, ultraspecialized merchandising (say, jewelry), hotels and restaurants. Certain people even have to live there, particularly the essential, if poorly paid, service workers.

Art galleries and upscale live entertainment are downtown for the same reason: They draw a relatively small if significant audience from all over the region, and, by definition, the city’s center is closest to everyone. When the promoters of a “rediscovered” downtown get to work, their odd focus on artists makes sense when considering the locational economics. Get the symbol of the downtown, and maybe substance will follow.

The economic logic for the power of the center seems to have been violated when one considers the--to put it kindly--less than thrilling comeback of a huge number of U.S. downtowns. That is because the fundamental economic logic has several countervailing logics. The laws of geometry rule out millions of quiet homes in the middle of a city. Family-driven consumer preferences result in trading off the vibrant downtown energy for tranquil backyards. When the cost of obtaining these amenities is not high, goodbye to the value of downtown.

Does this mean the U.S. downtown is doomed, except for New York and San Francisco? Perhaps, at least in the ill-formed current image. Instead consider what does work: specialized finance, service, light manufacturing, wholesale and entertainment industries. So, too, bargain and exotic shopping, mid-range artist quarters in the hulks abandoned by industry and some classic downtown leftovers, like fancy hotels.

Downtown Chicago seems to have struck this balance. Yet, its far-flung suburbs keep growing. How many “real” Chicagoans use this lively downtown for their daily life? Is it not a tourist attraction even for them? The city’s current downtown success is not a return, but a reuse, one that does not signal the demise of the inexorable suburban pull. For every Chicago, there is an Atlanta, where a similar strategy has failed.

In Los Angeles, the handsome buildings on Spring Street, the city’s old financial district, offer tantalizing possibilities. But not to be a “real” downtown, just like the old days. It is normal for subsequent generations to see physically attractive structures, imagine life in that era and wish to do a bit of time travel. But no one wants the whole picture: Castles, romantic and evocative now, were symbols of warfare, hunger and deprivation. So, too, the classic downtown.

Most U.S. downtowns will continue in their uneasy balance between disaster and energy, ever wanting to be what they may have been for a few fleeting decades, somehow looking for the big deal that will put them back to the transient moment almost no one actually remembers.