Word: downtowner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...when city planning was still a matter of deciding which neighborhood to carve up with the new freeway and how many grim apartment towers to insert in a newly leveled megalot, the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency decided to move its offices. The agency was stuck in an unfashionable downtown building on grubby, declining Spring Street, so in 1955 the city's official redevelopers fled to new quarters...
...than two dozen major restorations in all -- including what had been the CRA's office building. The CRA, as it happened, had helped foster this revival. So in 1980 back came the urban-planning bureaucrats to their original building, back this time as historic preservationists, back to the very downtown district they had abandoned a generation earlier...
...Americans manage to forget for so many years that downtowns are invigorating and old cities grand? That the dignity and Gemutlichkeit of 18th century buildings and 19th century streets are incomparable? That the physical past is worth preserving? Did a majority of Americans in 1970 actually prefer Century City to San Francisco? Were people fetched by the shiny new discord of Houston suburbs more than by shabby, genteel New Orleans, by the glass and steel of downtown Minneapolis more than by the brick and stone of downtown St. Paul...
...economic prosperity of the mid-'80s has of course helped stimulate both new construction and renovation, particularly in those cities blessed with high employment and booming industry. And some of the new downtown buildings are impressive. On the other hand, many cities have not revived. Detroit is still comatose, Gary, Ind., is not much healthier, and development in Oakland is lagging. Even in cities where renovation is rampant, gentrification has caused disgruntlement. Inhabitants of South Boston and East Los Angeles are not quite as excited as they might be about the exposed-brick, freshly baked, Benettonian fabulousness across town...
Yale police would not comment on the fact that a male Caucasian wearing a Yale hockey jersey, a blue bandanna, and blue sunglasses was driving a steam shovel through downtown New Haven at a fast rate last night...