From a Dry Goods Store to Downtown
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
It has always been my presumption that “downtown” was a Manhattan specific coinage that other cities picked up. In “A Small Boy and Others,” Henry James wrote of accompanying his aunt to A.T. Stewart’s store on Broadway and Chambers Street. James wrote that it represented “the enjoyment of our city as down-towny as possible.” Stewart’s, which opened in 1846, helped redefine the scale of “dry goods” emporiums, and in so doing drew vast numbers of female shoppers and promenaders to the city’s central business district, formerly a masculine preserve.
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