Downtown
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In American English, downtown refers to the commercial heart of a city. This is by analogy with its coinage in New York City, where downtown was used to refer to the early business center of the island of Manhattan, located at the southern end and now properly referred to as the Financial District.
Downtown is now used in two senses in New York City. Since the city now has two major business districts, downtown is still used as an informal name for the Financial District, in contradistinction to Midtown, the other commercial center. (Anything north of 59th Street, which is most of the island, is uptown.) However, the terms downtown and uptown are also used to indicate direction of travel: someone travelling south is heading downtown and someone heading north is heading uptown. By extension, the side of a north-south avenue on which traffic is travelling downtown (the west side) is referred to as the downtown side of the avenue, and analagously for the uptown side.
The name downtown is frequently used in popular culture:
- "Downtown", a song written by Tony Hatch and first recorded by Petula Clark.
- Downtown, a popular Japanese comedy unit that consists of Masatoshi Hamada and Hitoshi Matsumoto.
- Downtown, a 1990 movie starring Anthony Edwards and Forest Whitaker.
- Downtown, a short-lived MTV animated series.
- Downtown music, a categorization based on the cultural distinction between the musical communities of downtown and uptown Manhattan.
- The Downtown, a popular music venue on Long Island (New York).
- Downtown is a 2004 board wargame depicting the air war over Hanoi from 1965 until 1972.
- Downtown, a book of poetry by Yuri Andrukhovych.
- Downtown Radio, a contemporary commercial radio station based in Northern Ireland, owned by Emap.