thumb||Chicago Loop. Downtown is a term primarily used in North America to refer to a city's core or central business district, usually in a geographical, commercial, and community sense.

The term is thought to have been coined in New York City, where it was in use by the 1830s to refer to the original town at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan.Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 10. As the town of New York grew into a city, the only direction it could grow on the island was toward the north, proceeding upriver from the original settlement (the "up" and "down" terminology in turn came from the customary map design in which up was north and down was south). Thus, anything north of the original town became known as "uptown", while the original town (which was also New York's only major center of business at the time) became known as "downtown".

During the late 19th century, the term was gradually adopted by cities across the United States and Canada to refer to the historical core of the city (which was most often the same as the commercial heart of the city). As late as the 1880s, it was not included in dictionaries.Fogelson, 12. By the early 1900s, downtown was clearly established as the proper term in American English for a city's central business district.

Specific connotations

Downtown Manhattan, 1932. The typical North American downtown has certain unique characteristics. During the postwar economic boom in the 1950s, the residential population of most downtowns crashed. This has been attributed to reasons such as slum clearance, construction of the Interstate Highway System, and white flight from the urban core to the rapidly expanding suburbs. Due to well-intended but ineptly executed urban revitalization projects, downtowns eventually came to be dominated by high-rise office buildings in which commuters from the suburbs filled white-collar jobs, while the remaining residential populations sank further into unemployment, poverty, and homelessness. By the 1990s, even office-oriented businesses began to abandon the tired old downtowns for the suburbs, resulting in what are now known as "edge cities". One textbook, in explaining why edge cities are so popular, stated: cquote: The big central city comes with dirt, crime, subways, stress, congestion, high taxes, and poor public schools. Edge cities are not immune to all of these problems (especially congestion) but for now they largely avoid most of them.

Downtown New Orleans

In New Orleans the term "Downtown" refers to the CBD, southern end of Canal Street, and adjacent French Quarter as opposed to Uptown New Orleans, encompassing the Garden District and the areas near Loyola University New Orleans and Tulane University. The distinction has to do with the direction of flow of the Mississippi River, which is there in a northbound crescent such that, by compass directions, Downtown is north of Uptown.