Downtown is a term primarily used in North America

North America

North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

 by English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 speakers to refer to a city's core (or center) or central business district

Central business district

A central business district is the commercial and often geographic heart of a city. In North America this part of a city is commonly referred to as "downtown" or "city center"...

 (usually in a geographical, commercial, and community sense).

The term is thought to have been coined in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, where it was in use by the 1830s to refer to the original town at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

. As the town of New York grew into a city, the only direction it could grow on the island was toward the north, proceeding upriver from the original settlement (the "up" and "down" terminology in turn came from the customary map design in which up was north and down was south). Thus, anything north of the original town became known as "uptown" (Upper Manhattan

Upper Manhattan

Upper Manhattan denotes the more northerly region of the New York City Borough of Manhattan. Its southern boundary may be defined anywhere between 59th Street and 155th Street. Between these two extremes lies the most common definitions of Upper Manhattan as Manhattan above 96th Street...

), while the original town (which was also New York's only major center of business at the time) became known as "downtown" (Lower Manhattan

Lower Manhattan

Lower Manhattan is the southernmost part of the island of Manhattan, the main island and center of business and government of the City of New York...

).

During the late 19th century, the term was gradually adopted by cities across the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 and Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 to refer to the historical core of the city (which was most often the same as the commercial heart

Commercial district

A commercial district or commercial zone is any part of a city or town in which the primary land use is commercial activities , as opposed to a residential neighbourhood, an industrial zone, or other types of neighbourhoods...

 of the city). Notably, it was not included in dictionaries as late as the 1880s. But by the early 1900s, downtown was clearly established as the proper term in American English

American English

American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....

 for a city's central business district.

Specific connotations

The typical North American downtown has certain unique characteristics. During the postwar economic boom in the 1950s, the residential population of most downtowns crashed. This has been attributed to reasons such as slum clearance

Urban renewal

Urban renewal is a program of land redevelopment in areas of moderate to high density urban land use. Renewal has had both successes and failures. Its modern incarnation began in the late 19th century in developed nations and experienced an intense phase in the late 1940s – under the rubric of...

, construction of the Interstate Highway System

Interstate Highway System

The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, , is a network of limited-access roads including freeways, highways, and expressways forming part of the National Highway System of the United States of America...

, and white flight

White flight

White flight has been a term that originated in the United States, starting in the mid-20th century, and applied to the large-scale migration of whites of various European ancestries from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions. It was first seen as...

 from the urban core to the rapidly expanding suburb

Suburb

The word suburb mostly refers to a residential area, either existing as part of a city or as a separate residential community within commuting distance of a city . Some suburbs have a degree of administrative autonomy, and most have lower population density than inner city neighborhoods...

s. Due to well-intended but ineptly executed urban revitalization projects, downtowns eventually came to be dominated by high-rise office buildings in which commuters from the suburbs filled white-collar

White-collar worker

The term white-collar worker refers to a person who performs professional, managerial, or administrative work, in contrast with a blue-collar worker, whose job requires manual labor...

 jobs, while the remaining residential populations sank further into unemployment, poverty, and homelessness. By the 1990s, even office-oriented businesses began to abandon the tired old downtowns for the suburbs, resulting in what are now known as "edge cities

Edge city

"Edge city" is an American term for a concentration of business, shopping, and entertainment outside a traditional urban area in what had recently been a residential suburb or semi-rural community...

". One textbook, in explaining why edge cities are so popular, stated:

Relative geographical use

The terms downtown and uptown can refer to cardinal direction

Cardinal direction

The four cardinal directions or cardinal points are the directions of north, east, south, and west, commonly denoted by their initials: N, E, S, W. East and west are at right angles to north and south, with east being in the direction of rotation and west being directly opposite. Intermediate...

s, for example, in Manhattan, where downtown is also a relative geographical term. Anything south of where the speaker is currently standing, in most places, is said to be downtown. Anything north of the speaker is uptown. In the common New York phrase, "We're going to take the subway

New York City Subway

The New York City Subway is a rapid transit system owned by the City of New York and leased to the New York City Transit Authority, a subsidiary agency of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and also known as MTA New York City Transit...

 downtown," downtown refers to traveling in the geographic direction of south. A person standing on 121st Street and walking ten blocks south could also be said to have walked ten blocks downtown. The term uptown is used to refer to the cardinal direction north.

Such concepts derive from Manhattan's elongated shape, running roughly north/south and nowhere more than 2 mi (3.2 km) wide. As such, most of the train service and major thoroughfares on the island travel in the uptown/downtown directions. The other boroughs

Borough (New York City)

New York City, one of the largest cities in the world, is composed of five boroughs. Each borough now has the same boundaries as the county it is in. County governments were dissolved when the city consolidated in 1898, along with all city, town, and village governments within each county...

 are wider, and "downtown" there refers to Lower Manhattan, Downtown Brooklyn

Downtown Brooklyn

Downtown Brooklyn is the third largest central business district in New York City , and is located in the northwestern section of the borough of Brooklyn...

, or some more local business district. Mercantile efforts to promote the South Bronx as "Downtown Bronx" have met with little success.

Manhattan exceptions to the equation of "downtown" with "south" include Cherry Street

Cherry Street (Manhattan)

Cherry Street, is a one-way street in the New York City borough of Manhattan. It currently has two sections, mostly running along parks, public housing, co-op buildings, tenements, and crossing underneath the Manhattan Bridge overpass....

 and nearby parts of the Lower East Side

Lower East Side

The Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....

, where downtown is westward towards City Hall

New York City Hall

New York City Hall is located at the center of City Hall Park in the Civic Center area of Lower Manhattan, New York City, USA, between Broadway, Park Row, and Chambers Street. The building is the oldest City Hall in the United States that still houses its original governmental functions, such as...

, while south on Montgomery Street is not called downtown since it runs into the East River

East River

The East River is a tidal strait in New York City. It connects Upper New York Bay on its south end to Long Island Sound on its north end. It separates Long Island from the island of Manhattan and the Bronx on the North American mainland...

.

In some North American cities, "downtown" is the formal name of the neighborhood in which the city's central business district is located.