Well the thing is that the New York of 1846 to 1862 was very different from downtown New York now. Really nothing from that period still exists in New York.
The Seven Elevens in downtown Houston are better protected than the largest oil refinery in the world.
The largest refinery also in Houston did not have a single armed guard on duty.
It's really kind of hard to be a suburb of nothing. If you don't have a downtown, you really don't have anything. It's hard to build a community around parking lots and subdivisions.
I love living downtown.
I can remember when anything further downtown New York than Canal Street was risky and the whole area still looked like a '70s cop movie location; when the original loft-owners were more dash-than-cash, artistic types.
I moved to New York to work in theater, so my range of motion was really from where I lived - which was downtown, in the Lower East Side - to Midtown, where the theaters are. So I got to know New York, Midtown and south.
I'm from downtown New Orleans. Downtown consists of the 7th ward, the 8th ward, the 9th ward.