As I understand it, like Philadelphia, Natchez MS also has an uptown and downtown with actual altitudinal meaning: Downtown is below the bluff on the riverbank, and Uptown is above it, on the bluff. I’m not sure if any other river cities have similar topography.
“Downtown” was performed by Petula Clark, while “Uptown” was performed by Prince.
WHAAAAAAT?
I live in uptown Dallas. A bit north of the central business district
In Washington DC, downtown refers to the government/business district centered around the White House. This includes the L street corridor where a lot of lobbyists, NGOs, law firms, and government contractors are located. There are also a lot of businesses in the area that cater to these businesses like restaraunts for lunch and copy shops.
On the weekends this area feels kind of like a ghost-town as there aren’t many apartments and there isn’t much of a reason to be there on the weekends.
DC doesn’t really have an uptown. Other than downtown, people use the terms Northwest, Southeast (mistakenly believed by people from Northern Virginia to be an incredibly dangerous no-go zone, but actually the site of one of the hottest real estate markets in the country: Capitol Hill); Northeast, and Southwest.
In a reversal of the Billy Joel scheme, there was the 1960s girl group The Crystals, who sang a song called “Uptown” from the perspective of a girl who lived uptown, presumably in Harlem or Spanish Harlem, in a tenement (“where folks don’t have to pay much rent.”) She contrasts herself with her monied boyfriend, who works downtown, presumably in the financial district.
Note, too, that the term “downtown” is, in my experience at least, a rather North American construction. Australians and Brits, for example, don’t really use the term.
In Australia, if you’re headed to the main “downtown” part of the city, you will probably just say “I’m going into the city,” and people will understand what you mean. If you need to be more specific, you might even refer to it as the CBD, which stands for Central Business District.
Of course, this sort of thing is further complicated in England. London is a sprawling city, which can, for some purposes, encompass just about everything inside the M25. But “The City” is a much more specific piece of property covering, i believe, about a square mile around the financial district.
I’ve hardly ever heard Australians or Brits use “downtown” outside of North America.
I’d suggest the commonest phrase for Brits is “I’m going into town” - even when this means into London.
Yes, it means the district covered by the City of London, not Greater London. However, its more common usage is as a metaphor for the financial institutions of London, equivalent to ‘Wall Street’.
This reminds me, what about the possibly obsolete phrase “up to Oxford” or “being sent down” meaning expelled from the University?. Is Oxford upriver of London, and if so, is that the origin of these expressions? That’s to say, as if the expellee was most likely a resident of London in the first place, so he’d head down the river back to London?
Or were “up” and “down” always synonymous with “away from London” and “towards London”?
I’ve never heard either of those phrases before. The closest I can think of are ‘sent down’ = ‘sent to prison’ (is that one just British?), and being ‘sent to Coventry’, being ostracised.
All I can suggest is railway terminology, where the ‘up’ line/train/direction was/is generally in the direction of a major junction or terminus, most commonly London.
The terms are by no means obsolete: this page (Feb 2006) from the Oxford Alumni Association of New York contains:
and here is a British Council definition:
[QUOTE]
send down somebody or send somebody down (British) to make a student leave a university because they have done something wrong
[ul]
[li]He was sent down after failing his second year exams. [usually passive][/li][li]She was sent down from Oxford for taking drugs. [often + from][/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
Note that this meaning is listed after GorillaMan’s more universal British usage of “sent to prison”.
Oxford is indeed upriver from London: the River Thames is often locally called the Isis in the neighborhood of Oxford, although an Oxonian would still refer to stretches downriver from Oxford as the Thames. However, one also goes “up to Cambridge”, despite the lack of a connecting river in that case. I suspect that the origin of “sent down” is that, in the minds of the officials inflicting such punishment on a wayward student, banishment from the University would invariably involve a lowering of status. This would also explain the verb to rusticate, which is to suspend (rather than “send down”, i.e. expel) a student. Despite its implication of being sent to the countryside, one can be “rusticated” from Oxbridge even if one ends up in London or New York, both noticeably larger cities than Oxford or Cambridge. Think of it as “Center-of-the-Universe-itis”, a disease not unknown in those hallowed halls of academe.
Oxford and Cambridge aside, one goes “up” to London, as GorillaMan noted – certainly from anywhere in Southern England. It would sound wrong to me (a former Londoner) that one would go “up to London” from the North of England or Scotland, but I’d be happy to be corrected on that matter.
Evelyn Waugh used one of these these phrases in Brideshead Revisited, which was written after WWII but takes place largely in the 1920s. At one point Charles Ryder says that Sebastian Flyte “has been sent down” (expelled). And I don’t remember for sure, but I think at another point Charles tells his father he wants to leave Oxford and his father protests, “But everyone’s up at least three years!” Or maybe I read that one someplace else.
I think P.G. Wodehouse used these expressions too, so it must have been an early 20th century custom.
I forgot about that. “Going into town” is a phrase that Australians use too, even for large cities like Sydney.
Spectre, those phrases predate Waugh and Wodehouse by a long time, and are still in use today. They’re “Oxbridge vocabulary”, although not specifically confined to those two establishments (unlike some even more obscure terms and customs which may be limited to individual colleges).
Here is a page from the official web site of University College, Oxford (founded 1249, and numbering amongst its alumni such diverse talents as Percy Shelley, C. S. Lewis, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Clinton):
Here is a current page from the Cherwell, one of the student newspapers (named after Oxford’s other river):
(bolding in the above quotes is mine)
I used to think that coke came in a bottle or can
Silk underwear
Wasn’t right on a man
Hush puppies and sneakers
Now it’s alligator shoes
Because downtown came uptown for you
David Wilcox
In Queens we talked about going to the city when we went to Manhattan. I don’t recall ever going downtown until we were there. Queens had a few downtownish places - Jamaica and Main Street Flushing, but I don’t recall anyone ever calling them downtown.
Philadelphian checking in; we really don’t use the term uptown for anything. Conceivably that could be North Philly in an analogous way to Harlem but if anyone ever said that it’s now archaic.
It’s far more common to hear Center City or “going in town” as a downtown reference. In fact I can usually pick out non-natives easily by their grafting the downtown and uptown on to a city that really doesn’t use it.
There is an Uptown String Band in the Mummers who started in 1938. Their logo is a (modernized) skyline of Center City so I assume they started in South Philly; the History portion of their website isn’t helpful on this count. And now their office is located in the far suburbs…
Same here, when I lived in the Bronx. “I’m going into the City” was heading south to anywhere in Manhattan, even Harlem.
In my hometown of Kingston, NY, Uptown was the business district and Downtown (where I live) was down by the creek away from the historic (first capital of NYS and all) and business area. Broadway ran pretty much the length of the town.
In Pittsburgh the area of the city center which is close to the point (the confluence) is called downtown while moving east from there you’re said to be going uptown.
Actually, since the advent of the Metrorail system in the mid-1970s, the idea of city district-type names has become revived in Washington. Although they don’t match up with postal designations, administrative designations (such as neighbourhood councils) or traditional neighbourhoods, most peopel refer to areas named after the Metrorail station nearby.
I see this as a good thing and a bad thing. I think it’s good, because it’s much more convenient to refer to parts of a city by well-known neighbourhood or district descriptors, rather than major street names or compass directions. On the other hand, what has happened in many areas is that the Metro station name has swallowed up neighbourhoods that are not actually part of that district traditionally.
For example, Washington’s West End, just across Rock Creek Park from Georgetown, is now considered part of Foggy Bottom. And the Buckingham neighbourhood of Arlington, near the interchange of Arlington Boulevard (U.S. 50) and Glebe Road (Virginia 120) is becoming part of Ballston. These days most people won’t understand what you’re talking about if you say “West End” or “Buckingham.”
One thing that is happening now is that special interests are lobbying to have their designations added to station names. I think this is a very bad idea. What should just be the Woodley Park station is officially the “Woodley Park-National Zoo/Adams-Morgan” station and what should just be the Vienna station is officially the “Vienna-Fairfax/George Mason University” station (there’s a convoluted logic to the use of hyphens and slashes, but it seems entirely pointless to me).
And the most petty, pointless, and harmful name change was the renaming of the “National Airport” station to “Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport Station,” which required an expenditure of millions by the financially strapped transportation authority to appease the St. Ronald cult at the Capitol.
I do think though that Washington’s system is much better than in New York and Chicago, for example, where the train stations are named after streets rather than districts.
See also Little Shop of Horrors:
Of course, the part of town they’re referring to as downtown hasn’t moved, but it’s quickly becoming expensive. Except the Bowery, which I’m not sure will ever actually gentrify.
I prefer the MTA’s solution. I can name more than one train station in many largish “districts” in Manhattan (Examples? In Chinatown: the B & D at Grand & Chrystie Sts, the N, Q, R, & W at Broadway & Canal St, the 6 at Lafayette & Canal Sts, and the J, M, & Z at Centre & Canal Sts; City Hall & the courthouses: the 6 on Park Row at the Brooklyn Bridge, the J, M, & Z at Park Row and Reade St, and the R & W at Broadway & Murray St; in the Financial District: the R & W at Cortlandt St & Trinity Pl, the E at the WTC and Park Pl, the 4 & 5 at Fulton St and Broadway, the A & C and J, M, & Z at Fulton and Nassau Sts, the 2 & 3 at William and Fulton Sts, the 2 & 3 at Wall and William Sts, the J, M, & Z at Broad St and Exchange Pl, the 4 & 5 at Wall St and Broadway, the 1 at Rector and Greenwich Sts, the 4 & 5 at Bowling Green & State St, the R & W at Whitehall & State Sts, and the 1 at the South Ferry). With the density of train stations in most of New York (especially midtown and lower Manhattan and much of Brooklyn), naming them after neighborhoods or districts might not work as well as it does in DC, where there is one Metro station per larger area. Besides, many of these stations have had the same names for decades – some for over 100 years – so it would unnecessarily confuse commuters at first.
And the MTA would never want to confuse or inconvenience its commuters, would it?