"midtown"

[Lynne Murphy]

>I was looking over various dictionary entries for "midtown,"
>and I have to confess I'm not sure what it really means. I'm
>too New York-centric to get the Manhattan arrangement out of
>my mind--can we have a discussion of what "midtown" means
>in other cites, or in smaller things (if it is used there)?
>
>Jesse Sheidlower

In the small town in west-central NY where I grew up, one would say
"downtown" (and one still does) to mean "the center of town" (where the
shops used to be before megastores and commuting destroyed such things).
This town had no downtown/uptown contrast--just "downtown".  Rochester had a
(now defunct) Midtown Mall and "midtown" branches of the banks and
department stores (the latter, now defunct) which was in what we'd call
"downtown Rochester".  But if people were going to that part of town, they'd
say they were going "downtown" or "into the city", not "I'm going (to)
midtown" (unless they said "I'm going to Midtown" meaning the mall).
There's a chance you might hear 'midtown' in a traffic report, I don't
know--more likely you'd hear something more particular.  In Urbana-Champaign
and Waco, we'd also refer to "downtown" to mean the city-center. (In C-U,
you always had to qualify:  downtown Champaign, or downtown Urbana.)  (I
think 'downtown' might've been used for the center of Amherst, MA too, but I
can't remember--since I lived on campus, I think we just said "I'm going
into town".)  I don't recall "midtown" ever used in these places.

(I'll be at a conference for the next few days, so might not be able to keep
up with the discussion.)

Lynne

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