Downtowns Keep Reinventing Themselves

By Alan Ehrenhalt

Some center cities are coming back from the pandemic, with residential populations increasing even as many continue to work from home. While restaurants and retail are still suffering, it seems fair to speculate that something meaningful is happening.
 

If this is a crucial moment in the history of American cities—and few would deny that it is—then it may be an even more critical time in the continuing saga of urban downtowns. Millions of words have been written about downtown and its problems since the COVID-19 pandemic began; meanwhile new habits, circumstances and challenges are turning up all the time.
 

In most cities, downtown retail commerce is stagnant, but in some notable cases the downtown residential population is increasing even as the city as a whole and the broader metro population are shrinking. In some of those places, center-city residents are choosing to live near their place of work while going to it only on a part-time basis. It’s important—albeit difficult—to try to make some sense of why these and other evolutions are taking place.
 

Maybe it will be helpful to look back before we look forward, and to take note of how downtowns in America and the rest of the developed world have reinvented themselves over the past century and a half.
 

We tend to conceptualize downtowns as the entities we remember from our early years, but in fact they are remarkably protean institutions. Until the late nineteenth century, western cities had compact downtowns in which people both lived and worked. If you ran a counting house in London, or baked hot cross buns, or sold linens, the odds were that you lived up the stairs from your place of business.
 

That cozy arrangement was broken up for the middle class in London with the passage of the Cheap Trains Act of 1883, which made it feasible to have a small cottage in the suburbs and commute to the city every morning. The cottages weren’t universally popular—H. G. Wells called them “a bright fungoid growth in the ditch”—but they changed the character of downtowns in London and later in other cities as well.
 

By the 1920s, American social scientists were laying out diagrams of what took place downtown and what happened further away. Downtown remained the center of culture and commercial activity, but it was encircled by a factory district just beyond it and by increasingly affluent neighborhoods for downtown workers ten or fifteen miles from the center. All this was made possible, of course, by the ubiquity of the automobile, which by the end of the '20s had evolved from a luxury good to a common possession of the middle class.

The rest of the evolutionary process doesn’t require much elaboration. The Interstate Highway System made commuting from ever-more-distant suburbs an ordinary metropolitan experience, and eventually retail commerce moved out to the suburbs as well, leaving downtowns as office employment centers but very little else—places that were deserted and depressing once the workday ended. This is the downtown that many of us remember from our childhoods. It’s nothing to be especially fond of, but it reflects a major epoch in the history of city centers. Suburbanites complained endlessly about long rush-hour commutes through gridlock on overcrowded freeways, but they endured them.