[!@#$%!]

this comes from the typical layout of american cities.

european and latin american cities are organized around a main square featuring a church, and a political power center, etc.\

not so american cities-- american cities are linearly organized along a "main street".

so from that you can extrapolate the notion of a city center where the business are located, and then, up that same main street, the residential areas.

you can see that very clearly in small american towns, or better yet, in the classic town from western movies-- one long street with the businesses on the side of it. there are no gunfights in the middle of the piazza, right? (not even in spaghetti westerns).

even today you can see many towns here in the west that are arrayed along the highway-- towns shaped like ribbons along the road.

then also look at new york, with its avenues running north/south traversed by numbered streets. downtown and uptown are easy to tell, right? downtown/midtown/uptown going from south to north as the numbers go up too.

that linguistic practice of "downtown" as the city center works even in cities that are not organized strictly along a main street-- like d.c., where people go "downtown" and there's an "uptown theatre" but the city is diamond-shaped and there is no central avenue... there is a sort of ceremonial center-- oh, long story. im tired.

& so on & so forth etc etc bla bla