When did “downtown” hit its nadir?

[briantroutman]

The Petula Clark song "Downtown"  got stuck in my head today (actually, the cheese-oid version by Rick Moranis' lounge singer alter ego from SCTV). It always seemed somewhat ironic that Petula's paean to center city living was a big hit in 1965, which is around the time that the health of many American downtowns began an intense and rapid decline. Within a handful of years, the downtown Sears Roebuck would relocate to a suburban shopping mall, downtown transit service would decline to a shadow of its former self, and the downtown movie house where the whole family watched Ben Hur together would be showing Deep Throat.

Conversely, this was probably the point at which the drive to suburbanize everything–homes, shopping centers, offices–reached its zenith.

Then again, some notable projects around this time made an earnest attempt to stem the tide of suburbanization. Rochester's Midtown Plaza comes to mind as an example of a particularly overt attempt to bring suburbanites back downtown. But these types of projects have always struck me as reactive urban renewal plans that were ultimately unsuccessful–too little too late.

So when did downtown hit rock bottom? Obviously the answer might be different for each city, and I'd be interested in hearing people's different takes on the topic.

[Max Rockatansky]

In older cities it really hasn't stopped declined.  The zenith of the downtown areas of cities was probably when the US Route system was at it's absolute height during the late 1950s.  Why would anyone except trendy hipsters want to shop in some uber difficult place to park in a city that was meant more pedestrian traffic when it's so much easier to go to your local shopping mall?  Basically at least in America the Interstate was really the facilitator that led to the urban sprawl.  Most of the modern cities tend me be huge geographically out west compared to the older ones out east.  You could say that the newer cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix were designed with the freeway and sprawl in mind...when it was more of a wedge-in attempt back out east.

[AlexandriaVA]

I think that most urban centers (downtowns, if you will) peaked during or around WWII due to travel restrictions. I'd wager that if not for WWII, you'd have seen suburbanization following the end of the Great Depression (possibly even with highway construction as a New Deal jobs program).

[sparker]

Downtown L.A., in my view, bottomed-out in the mid-to-late '60's, after trolley/interurban service (via municipal lines + Pacific Electric) had ceased passenger service and the area (I'll define it as US 101 to the north, CA 110 to the west, Alameda Ave. to the east, and Venice Blvd./16th Street to the south) began losing the "anchor" department stores that had been its retail mainstay for decades (May Company, Broadway, etc.).  Not coincidentally, this was the time when the area was also fully encircled by freeways, the last of which to be constructed was the Santa Monica/I-10 viaduct along 18th St.  Also, this marked the time when the retail center effectively moved west to Wilshire Blvd. in what is now known as "mid-city"; most of those "anchor" stores expanded their branches along that corridor, creating a "new" virtual downtown that was more linear than clustered. 

The original downtown area has staged a partial comeback since the mid-70's, largely due to the development of the Figueroa St. area, which features major hotels, Staples Center, and extensive "high-rise" office complexes as well as upscale apartment/condo developments -- and has been facilitated by the deployment of light rail through the area.  Full rehabilitation has been compromised, however, by the longstanding presence of a large amount of homeless who started flocking to the area during its "nadir" period; city policy regarding that issue has over the years widely swung from "clear 'em out" to "shelter as many as possible", depending on the political leanings of the mayor and the city staff (and, as is usually the case in L.A., the attitude of the police commission and/or the chief) -- and whether they take their cues from local activists or the business "community", such that it is.  The future of downtown L.A. is likely to rest on whether some policy consensus regarding this issue can be reached -- and maintained regardless of the particular officeholders' predilections.

[Rothman]

[Max Rockatansky]

^^^^ I like how a drop of 12 points on the Dow was a big deal...oh how things change. 

[SP Cook]

Every city is different.  As it relates to shopping, in most places it is when "the" mall opened.   Really, one Christmas everybody shopped downtown, and the next no one did.  Why?  Because people like malls better.  Free parking.  Safety.  Lifestyle.  Choice.  And, in many cases, freed from exhorbinant prices charge by the rich white landlords and merchant of the city. 

As it relates to business, while certainly the "office park dad" is a sterotype based on reality, I see this as only begining.  And great.   Again choice, safety, and lifestyle.  How many jobs, considering modern technology, really need an office in downtown anywhere?  As long as a place has good internet, good roads, and, for most jobs, a good airport, most jobs can be done most anywhere.  I think the next generation will have far more people enjoying life working in much more healthy environments.

[AlexandriaVA]

At least in the DC area, suburban office parks are becoming zombie properties, along with many suburban malls.

[Avalanchez71]

The office parks in Franklin, TN are near 100% occupancy and many more are being built as we speak.

[Rothman]

That's all fine and dandy, but it seems to me office space can fill up to its brim in some suburbs while office parks sit nearly vacant in others.  I've never looked at the incentives that come into play when someone decides on an office location, but it seems bizarre to me just by going by my own eye-scans of the office parks around here.

[Brandon]

That's all fine and dandy, but it seems to me office space can fill up to its brim in some suburbs while office parks sit nearly vacant in others.  I've never looked at the incentives that come into play when someone decides on an office location, but it seems bizarre to me just by going by my own eye-scans of the office parks around here.

Sometimes it's due to access.  That's one of the reasons we've had a massive increase in warehouses and other logistics-based facilities.  We're close to the largest intermodal yards in the region, and have ready access to I-55, I-80, and I-355, as well as a working river.

[Scott5114]

In Oklahoma City, it was late 80s, early 90s. It wasn't the malls that killed downtown OKC, it was urban renewal under the Pei Plan, an ambitious plan by I.M. Pei to remodel downtown Oklahoma City under a master plan. Unfortunately, the only part of it that really happened was the demolition, and not the construction, leading to a removal of vast swaths of OKC's older buildings with nothing new to replace it. The oil bust and resulting bank collapses in the 1980s did nothing to help matters.

In the early 1990s, OKC lost out on an airline maintenance facility to Indianapolis, partly because of the latter city's active downtown area. This was the catalyst that got city leaders working on actively improving downtown OKC, and led to the first of several MAPS sales tax increments. This is how we got what is now the Chesapeake Arena, the Bricktown Canal, and so forth.

[empirestate]

Funny you should ask...

I just today posted a video from Rochester in 1963, and it's centered on the recent opening of Midtown Plaza as a symbol of just such an effort. I was struck be watching this video how ironically optimistic it was, given that the city's downtown decline would be starting a few short years after the film was made, and would be exacerbated by many of the policies illustrated in it.

So, in short, that video could itself be taken to represent the turning point for Rochester's downtown.

EDIT to add direct link to the video:
https://youtu.be/6v5x6qIy4Xc
iPhone

[briantroutman]

In older cities it really hasn't stopped declined.

Among Eastern cities, it seems there's a certain class of city that's not small enough or touristy enough to sustain a "cute little downtown" , yet also not large enough to have achieved a certain critical mass of offices, middle class in-town residents, and cultural institutions to sustain a vibrant central business district. Along these lines in my home state, I think of Harrisburg, which beyond the Capitol Complex and a little "restaurant row"  on 2nd Street, has little to offer downtown.

But there are literally millions of people (and I'm not trying to be condescending here) who aren't hipsters, freaks, or communist sympathizers–upstanding, productive citizens with jobs–who don't care about the inconveniences of downtown parking because they happily live day-to-day without driving. Perhaps you're disconnected from the East to the point that you don't know this element of American society exists.

Downtown L.A., in my view, bottomed-out in the mid-to-late '60's...

I'm no expert on Los Angeles, but I would have guessed downtown L.A. to have bottomed out maybe a decade later than that. It's anecdotal evidence, of course, but I think back to the opening sequence of Duel from 1971 (well, actually the extended opening sequence was from 1972), and we see a series of POV shots of the protagonist driving northbound, first on Figueroa at 9th, then on 6th approaching Broadway, and finally northbound on Broadway approaching 6th before heading north on the Arroyo Seco out of town. The street side scenery looks bustling with storefronts like Kress, Florsheim, and a Forum Cafeteria–the kind of places you can imagine a busy middle class worker patronizing. It seems to have more of a "pre-apocalyptic"  vibrancy than the images of Los Angeles I associate with the '80s and beyond.

Perhaps my impression is colored by its kinship with the Renaissance Center in Detroit, but I tend to associate the landmark Bonaventure towers with a mid '70s attempt to revitalize downtown–i.e., indicating it hadn't quite bottomed yet. The city went through something of a downtown building boom in the 1980s, but it's my impression that the growth was in glass-covered skyscrapers for nine-to-five office space. Perhaps I'm misreading things, but it seems that it wasn't until the '90s and beyond when scarcity of new developable land drove real estate prices high enough that downtown began to become a more attractive place to shop, play, and live.

But Los Angeles is also different in the sense that the city is so geographically large it encompasses many lower density and car dependent areas that would be out of municipal bounds and considered "suburbs"  in the East.

Ford to City: Drop Dead

This precise image came to mind when I was writing my original post. This general period also calls to mind the depictions of late-'70s N.Y.C. from McCloud and Barney Miller, which truly made the city seem like an ugly, decaying, and dysfunctional mess. Then again, while being at the brink of bankruptcy was a very visible negative episode for the city, I have to think that this moment may have been the "last straw"  for a number of small business owners and residents who had stubbornly hung on as their neighbors escaped the city in the prior years, and the city would continue it's downward slide as these residents fled. And we also have to consider that the 1977 blackout and Son of Sam killings were still a couple of years in the future at this point.

How many jobs, considering modern technology, really need an office in downtown anywhere?  As long as a place has good internet, good roads, and, for most jobs, a good airport, most jobs can be done most anywhere.  I think the next generation will have far more people enjoying life working in much more healthy environments.

It's perhaps counterintuitive, but I've read that the explosion of technologies that allow for telecommuting have actually accelerated the trend toward urban living. You might think that, if one could live anywhere and telecommute, that person would move to rural area with a low cost of living, "fresh air" , etc., but apparently, the isolation of working alone at home makes most people want to get out of the house and be around people in some fashion.

I understand this completely since I've been primarily working from home for more than five years, and typically at the end of the day I'm clawing at the front door to get out of the house.

At least in the DC area, suburban office parks are becoming zombie properties, along with many suburban malls.

It seems that, like the Middle American sit-down restaurant, the Middle American enclosed shopping mall is getting squeezed on both ends. Higher end customers are being siphoned off by outdoor "lifestyle centers"  (fake downtowns) as well as real downtowns in some cities, and lower end customers are defecting to discount super centers like Walmart and the big box stores that cluster nearby.

In Oklahoma City, it was late 80s, early 90s.

My brother and his wife lived in OKC for a few years, and while we visited Bricktown several times (as well as some other downtown attractions), it seemed like you quickly got into ghost town territory if you ventured a block or two off course. I remember him saying that they briefly considered living downtown, but that it just wasn't feasible; I believe he said there wasn't even a single grocery store near downtown.

So, in short, that video could itself be taken to represent the turning point for Rochester's downtown.

In your opinion, Rochester began its descent in the early '60s and either hasn't bottomed yet or hasn't improved from its bottom?

[Max Rockatansky]

In older cities it really hasn't stopped declined.

Among Eastern cities, it seems there's a certain class of city that's not small enough or touristy enough to sustain a "cute little downtown" , yet also not large enough to have achieved a certain critical mass of offices, middle class in-town residents, and cultural institutions to sustain a vibrant central business district. Along these lines in my home state, I think of Harrisburg, which beyond the Capitol Complex and a little "restaurant row"  on 2nd Street, has little to offer downtown.

But there are literally millions of people (and I'm not trying to be condescending here) who aren't hipsters, freaks, or communist sympathizers–upstanding, productive citizens with jobs–who don't care about the inconveniences of downtown parking because they happily live day-to-day without driving. Perhaps you're disconnected from the East to the point that you don't know this element of American society exists.

Uhh....are you kidding?...good god you really ought to read some of my travel threads...too bad I wasn't on here in 2014/2015 because I visited a crap ton of the mid-west and east coast.  But I digress....I've lived in ten different states which would have included Connecticut, North Carolina, and Florida.  Is that not a generalization of your own to assume that because I live in California that I don't know anything else about the rest of the country?  At least I find that to be the typical mentality when people who don't know me assume I lived on the west coast my entire life.  So with that in mind let me speak to what I know:

Florida:  I'd say the smaller cities generally have the rotten downtown core while it's the larger cities like Miami that actually have a vibrant downtown. 
Connecticut:  Mostly this would be smaller cities or towns which seemed to have been healthy the smaller they are.  Hartford really as a city is on the decline as a whole which would have been the major city at one point...now it's just poverty striken.
North Carolina:  Out in the boonies the downtown areas seem to be quasi-healthy in places but in others not so much.  I noticed that Asheville is drawing in a lot of those hipsters and Bolishvick types you mentioned above....
Nevada:  Pretty much everything is dead outside of Vegas, Carson City, and Reno.  Urban sprawl really has pushed major businesses out of the downtowns asides from casinos.  With Vegas almost all the big casinos are actually outside the city limit now on Las Vegas Blvd.
California:  Nobody likes downtown here except with rare exceptions like Eureka in the small town variety.  San Francisco is obviously an exception for a lot of reasons...namely lack of access that is similar to Manhatten keeping everything else contained.  L.A. is an urban sprawl spreading away from downtown and Sacramento's core was decayed heavily until it was revitalized as a tourist trap.
New Mexico:  A lot of the smaller cities seem to have a downtown that's doing better than other places.  Las Cruces managed to keep everything self contained but Albuquerque is sprawling away from downtown.  Some cities like Ruidoso the downtown is a tourist attractions while others like Roswell and Alamogordo they are dying.
Arizona:  In the big cities downtown is basically non-existent or was the primary driver of commerce long enough before urban sprawl for people to notice.  Phoenix has a tiny downtown for a city of it's size and Tucson is really a whole lot of nothing.  Flagstaff has a nice downtown but that's probably because of NAU and vintage US 66 tourism along with the Grand Canyon.  Most of the US 66 corridor towns like Winslow or Kingman are sprawling away from downtown.
Texas:  Really kind of like Arizona...save for San Antonio which has a huge tourist draw downtown with the Alamo and River Walk.
Michigan:  Downtown is long killed by urban sprawl, rust belt status is still in effect and getting even worse.  Detroit still has a long way to fall before things get better and largely obscures people from seeing similar trends in Lansing and Flint.  Grand Rapids basically is the city of the future for Michigan.  Small towns has mostly moved away from downtown commerce to sprawl out by the newer highways.
Illinois:  Just sucks...  Chicago has a decent downtown but it has an Manhattanization effect.  The rest of the state still suffers from similar post industrial problems like Michigan and most of the mid-west. 

[nexus73]

On the coast of Oregon, downtowns hit rockbottom in the Eighties.  As California property values climbed due to Reagan's defense buildup, people there began to come to the more depressed areas in the rest of the West, buy a place, then stick their gains in the bank, which were giving high interest rates at the time.  Thus began the sea changes for several of our smaller cities as they developed into classy tourist traps.  Gold Beach, Bandon, Florence, Lincoln City and Seaside would gain the most from this particular change.

Brookings, being in Curry County, where unusually low property taxes combined with no sales tax to make it easier on retirees, filled up with them.  That in turn helped the downtown businesses and district.  Coos Bay and North Bend saw a number of "cool" places akin to some of the good finds in PDX come along.  Beautification projects improved the look of the now-reviving downtowns of the largest urban area on the Oregon coast.  Reedsport was able to tread water, which was a miracle considering the area's largest employer (International Paper) closed up with the entire facility torn down.  Newport and Tillamook still look to be down compared to the rest of the coast.  I do not know how Astoria is doing at the present since it has been several years since I have been there.

Coast Range towns continue to languish.  The Willamette, Umpqua and Rogue River valley cities seem to be doing well.  Central Oregon (Bend, Redmond, Prineville, Sisters) has rebounded strongly from the housing bubble burst.  Klamath Falls is not doing so well. 

Rick

[briantroutman]

[Uhh....are you kidding?...good god you really ought to read some of my travel threads...too bad I wasn't on here in 2014/2015 because I visited a crap ton of the mid-west and east coast.  But I digress....I've lived in ten different states which would have included Connecticut, North Carolina, and Florida.  Is that not a generalization of your own to assume that because I live in California that I don't know anything else about the rest of the country?  At least I find that to be the typical mentality when people who don't know me assume I lived on the west coast my entire life.

I didn't mean to say that you weren't well traveled or any less than perceptive–and I hope my post didn't come across that way. Honestly, I didn't even know that you currently live in California...only that you generally post on Southwest-oriented threads.

And even among Easterners–someone could live a car-oriented life in New Jersey and the concept of living car-less in Manhattan would be entirely alien to him. Perhaps the difference in living in the East is that you're a little more likely to have friends or family who live car-less in the city. Plus you're closer, so you can visit the city more often.

But with regard to cities in "the East" , I'm generally referring to cities that were heavily urbanized by 1900–before development patterns began to be influenced by the automobile. Only two Southern cities cracked the top 20 in 1900: New Orleans and Louisville. Much of the South's urban growth occurred after the introduction of both automobiles and air conditioning, and the development patterns visible today largely reflect that.

Connecticut is kind of an odd case in that, while it is most definitely "Eastern"  in every sense, its urban areas have largely crumbled and boast some of the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the country. Perhaps this is exacerbated by the relatively small sizes of Connecticut's cities and the state's close proximity to New York. As a result, Connecticut's cities seem to have suffered the fate of cities like Allentown–depressed from deindustrialization, not large enough to sustain a critical mass of population and commercial and cultural activity to promote a vibrant center city, and close to much larger cities but not close enough to be a commuter town.

[Max Rockatansky]

Gotcha....to be honest I'm surprised that I haven't been called out on that or not talking about freeways all that much.  Even among the SW stuff I kind of find it boring conversation.  About the only thing that's capturing my attention is the I-11 planning stages and sometimes AZ 202.....lived there for a long time.  I'm sure the random posts in the SE and Mid-West boards have confused some....well now there is an explanation. 

Yeah my uncle lives down in D.C. and he hardly ever uses his car to go anywhere.  Usually he takes the train everywhere, especially up to coastal New Jersey where I have a couple cousins and a grand parent still.  The infrastructure with mass transit makes things way easier to use...at least compared to the west coast.  You can definitely tell the eastern seaboard was built with mass transit in mind while asides from San Francisco...not so much out west.  My Dad actually moved us to Connecticut and he commuted into NYC.  Granted he usually flew out on Monday on business trips and didn't come home until Friday.  His logic was lower cost of living and having a place that was a little closer to how Michigan was with Danbury.  There was a lot of small little towns like New Milford and Bridgewater that always had vibrant downtowns...they were actually pretty pleasant places to grow up around.  I think with Connecticut it's just way too easy to move out into the outlying areas rather than stay in those older cities like Hartford.  Strange to think how much poverty is really there and how much wealth is nearby.

I don't know....some cities like Orlando have very old downtown areas.  I remember Orlando was strangely walkable considering the actually city limits were surprisingly small.  Tampa seemed too far gone but had some trace reminds of how things used to be, especially with some of the annexed neighborhoods like Port Tampa.  Miami was always a modern city built around cars and Jacksonville seemed to be that way also.  The weird one was Key West....that's the place to go if you want a glimpse of how American life was before the Interstate and when the US Highway was king.

[empirestate]

Among Eastern cities, it seems there's a certain class of city that's not small enough or touristy enough to sustain a "cute little downtown" , yet also not large enough to have achieved a certain critical mass of offices, middle class in-town residents, and cultural institutions to sustain a vibrant central business district.

Absolutely, and I believe it has much to do with when the city reached its economic peak. For the smaller class of cities, this was often during the turn-of-the-century industrialization era; they did not continue expansive growth into the post-war years, and so they never got around to revamping their cityscapes the way mid-sized cities did in the 50s and 60s. As a result, these smaller cities often have a lot of their "quaint" building stock remaining, whereas a place like Rochester, which was prosperous well into the 20th century, discarded much of that in favor of the now-deprecated urban renewal aesthetic, which was very much in vogue at that time.

In your opinion, Rochester began its descent in the early '60s and either hasn't bottomed yet or hasn't improved from its bottom?

It's more of a supposition than an opinion, but yes. I would say that the wave of modernization and renewal of the cityscape that took place during that time, typified by the building of Midtown Plaza (and as a less-remembered example, the razing of the Main Street bridge storefronts), was the tipping point for the decline, even if it wasn't evident for a few years afterward.

By the late 60s, certainly, Rochester was experiencing notable social and economic unrest, and through the 80s and 90s when I was growing up there, racial and economic inequality became rampant as suburbanization accelerated. Then around the turn of the millennium, which the collapse of core industry (Kodak in Rochester's case, but by no means unique to that city–see Pittsburgh), it really began to feel there was nowhere to go but up.

I've been less connected to the city since those years, so it's hard to say if and when the downtown core actually hit rock bottom, but I do perceive that in many ways the decline hasn't yet rebounded, and may even have deepened in some pockets. To be sure, there's been renewed interest in the inner city since the 90s, and fingers of that have extended into the downtown core. But downtown's role as a shopping, business and cultural hub has never come back in any meaningful way, despite a small uptick during the late 80s and 90s with some new office towers and civic buildings.

Taken as a whole, I do think the region is enjoying new vitality. Like Pittsburgh and other post-industrial cities, a new energy in the service (e.g., the expansion of Wegmans) and research (a very active university and medical school, and an even larger technical institute) sectors is clearly visible. I can also say, anecdotally, that some people who were keen to flee the mid-sized Northeastern city a decade or two ago may be coming to find they didn't have it so bad in such a place, after all. A few have even returned.

[ixnay]

Pet's version of "Downtown" (one of the first popular songs I remember) calls to my mind downtown Chester, PA during its last years as a relatively thriving central business district, with Sears, Pep Boys, two McCrory's stores, Kinney Shoes (my dad worked there in high school), Dial Shoes (women's shoes), Flagg Bros. shoes, Slater's Shoes (I remember the big neon Buster Brown logo), Adams men's store, Philadelphia National Bank (where my mom [my dad's classmate at Chester HS] was a teller) and other banks, the Welsh Restaurant (on Welsh Street), John's Doggie Shop (the best dawgs in Chester), the Boyd and State cinemas, the Beef & Beer tavern, St. Michael's RCC, and the Pennsylvania RR/Penn Central RR/SEPTA train station high on an embankment cutting downtown in two.  Other than John's Doggie Shop and the Welsh Restaurant, and the movie theatres, about all of those businesses were on or just off of the street now called Avenue of the States, but back then called Edgmont Ave. or Market St. depending on where the business was.  Some of those buildings were demolished and became parklets.

The Chester Water Authority was at 5th and Welsh Sts., catty cornered across from then-city hall (a new glass city hall has since been built at 4th St. and Avenue of the States).

At the foot of Welsh St. was the Scott Paper plant whose water tower was painted like a wrapper of ScotTissue.  Thanks, Kimberly-Clark, for keeping that plant humming after buying Scott Paper a few years ago.  But why didn't you keep the water tower?!?

One of those parklets was the site of Speare Bros. department store ("We Are Never Knowingly Undersold!").  Weinberg's was another department store a couple of doors down from Speare's (Weinberg's had a branch in the Manoa Shopping Center on PA 3 in Haverford Township that I believe outlasted the downtown Chester store).  Yes, those were the days...

ixnay

P.S.  My favorite remake of "Downtown" was by Groundskeeper Willie ("Ach!  Doontoon!") on The Simpsons when he auditioned for Homer's barbershop quartet (or was that a different episode?).

[Scott5114]

My brother and his wife lived in OKC for a few years, and while we visited Bricktown several times (as well as some other downtown attractions), it seemed like you quickly got into ghost town territory if you ventured a block or two off course. I remember him saying that they briefly considered living downtown, but that it just wasn't feasible; I believe he said there wasn't even a single grocery store near downtown.

It's changed a lot in the last few years. Sheridan is now entirely urbanized all the way from Classen to I-235. There's a lot of infill happening between Bricktown and Deep Deuce, Midtown is a thing now, etc.

[jwolfer]

I don't know....some cities like Orlando have very old downtown areas.  I remember Orlando was strangely walkable considering the actually city limits were surprisingly small.  Tampa seemed too far gone but had some trace reminds of how things used to be, especially with some of the annexed neighborhoods like Port Tampa.  Miami was always a modern city built around cars and Jacksonville seemed to be that way also.  The weird one was Key West....that's the place to go if you want a glimpse of how American life was before the Interstate and when the US Highway was king.

Jacksonville burned in 1901. So all constuction was new in dowtown, lots of interssting buildings but sadly many have been torn down.  Jax had if i am not misken one if the largest streetcsr systems in the South prior to WWII. 

Jax dowtown is regrowing albeit slowly. It hit its lowpoint around 1980. The fancy department stores had all closed, (Regency Square Mall opened in 1967. Now regency is run down and empty.)

Jacksonville has a lot of potential. Great looking skyline from interstate 95 with the St. Johns River right in yhe middle of downtown. And for roadgeeks lots of bridges, 5 of them are downtown.





LGMS428

[Max Rockatansky]

Well that would explain my observations then, funny I never looked up the history of the city.  Weird how some cities reinvented themselves after disasters like Chicago which made them fit in better with modern times while others like San Francisco really just built upon the existing foundation.

[jwolfer]

Well that would explain my observations then, funny I never looked up the history of the city.  Weird how some cities reinvented themselves after disasters like Chicago which made them fit in better with modern times while others like San Francisco really just built upon the existing foundation.

One of the major architects thaf had a lot of building built was Klutho.

Jacksonville streetcar suburbs of Riverside/Avondale SW of downtown are all preserved hjstric district. Largest collection of Prairie Style architechture outside the midwest.  Other than the palms it could be suburbs of NYC or Chicago

LGMS428

[TheStranger]

Weird how some cities reinvented themselves after disasters like Chicago which made them fit in better with modern times while others like San Francisco really just built upon the existing foundation.

I tend to think of "downtown SF" as the Market Street corridor past Van Ness, and much of the Union Square and Financial District areas.  Maybe I'm a bit of a traditionalist in not considering SoMa as "downtown" even though the Transbay area blends in somewhat with Financial District, but SF's small size geographically (where the city itself does not include massively suburban areas the way Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Diego all do), its uninterrupted local transit systems (MUNI streetcars/cable cars for over a century, BART from 1970s on), and its position as NorCal's most important city that only has been challenged economically in the last 20 years...all kept the commercial core from ever declining.

Having said that...

The theater district on Market between 10th Street and Union Square declined rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s due to multiplexes opening elsewhere in the city and region, and the Mid-Market area from about 12th to 7th suffered greatly as a result, ending up as blighted as the nearby Tenderloin district (which has been low-income since the early part of the 20th century).  Only recently with Twitter and other tech companies moving out there has the area cleaned up somewhat, though some high-profile restaurant openings in that corridor in the last year have not succeded due to the demographic still not being able to afford some of those places.

The Financial District really came into its own in the late 1950s to mid 1970s with the skyscraper boom/Manhattanization (contemporaneous with Los Angeles developing Bunker Hill) bringing about such landmarks as the Transamerica Pyramid and the Bank of America Center, at least until established residents in the northern section of the district lobbied hard for a height moratorium that was implemented in the 1980s.  (At the time, the Embarcadero Freeway provided easy car access to the north Financial District; post-Loma Prieta this area is not as convenient to BART or the cable cars).  Fast forward to the 2010s and the Transbay area development has had height policies relaxed to encourage investment around Mission and 1st Streets.

Mission Bay was super industrial prior to the Giants' ballpark being constructed but has since become a further extension of the commercial stretch of SoMa.