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throwaway2037

    > Paris downtown

Where is downtown Paris? 1/2/3 arrondissement? I never heard the term used for Paris. Mostly, it is used to describe the Wall Street area of Manhattan (NYC) as the island is relatively north-south and Wall Street is on the southern end.

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It’s also come to mean the densest part of any city. Even the town I group up in would call the densest part “downtown”, even though the only buildings taller than two stories were city hall and the historic theater.

Today I learned!

I always thought "downtown" and "uptown" were more like "south from X" and "north from X" where X is some reference point in context (e.g. "where I'm standing"). Turns out, it's more similar to "downwell" and "upwell", i.e. towards or away from some central point (gravity wells being spherical-ish and all).

Uptown can mean anything out of: geographically north, upstream on a river, higher elevation, or higher income and wealth of the residents.

It just so happens that for Manhattan which is the most famous uptown, all four of those indicators point in the same direction. In general I think an area would more likely be called an uptown if it met more of those criteria relative to some downtown. (And there would be correlation, wealthier residents would buy higher-elevation land.)

I notice that non US English-speaking tend to use the term CBD instead of downtown, my assumption is that it is because of the NYC thing you mention

British people would say city centre or town centre.

Australians are the ones who say CBD.

I've seen it in Canada, NZ and India as well. Def not AU specific.

New Orleans seems to like giving directions relative to it's CBD (just south of the French Quarter). It's otherwise not common here in the US.

In New Zealand we refer to it as the CBD, but you could also say city centre or town centre (or just “town”).

Not sure I have ever heard downtown being used to refer to part of a New Zealand city although I understand its meaning.

I don't think there's any association with New York. etymonline claims that "downtown" originally refers to the idea that the suburbs are at a higher elevation than the city proper. I don't know how much stock I'd put in that, but I trust it more than someone's random intuition about the geography of New York.

( https://www.etymonline.com/word/downtown : "The notion is originally literal, of suburbs built on heights around a city." )

It's the only available word for the concept in American English. I wouldn't recommend saying CBD; that would refer to cannabidiol or to marijuana in general.

Reading more about it, accounts vary. There are historians who posit it was in fact inspired by Manhattan, or maybe Boston, but it's not cut and dry.

Edit forgot link: https://downtownny.com/news/where-did-downtown-come-from/

I'm not especially impressed by the argument "if we assume it came from Manhattan, then we can know it came from Manhattan":

> Let’s suppose that Fosdick, incoherent from distress, forgot to include the words “to the” between “down” and “town” when describing the direction in which people were fleeing. With this in mind, we can assume that Lower Manhattan is in fact the original “downtown,” as posited by Schwarzer, and that the possible Bostonian origin of the word is simply a misunderstanding.

I'm also frustrated by the lack of sourcing here but the wiki article for downtown [1] also points to Manhattan, citing a book I don't have a copy of. Allegedly it was in use in Manhattan in the 1830s, which aligns with the date given by the etymology entry linked previously.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown

https://www.etymonline.com/word/downtown The word was in want of a closer look in fresh archives. On a closer search, it's older (at least 1780s), American, but not apparently a New York reference at first.

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