DCHP-1 Online

Lower Town

• 1 the part of a town lying closest to the water front, usually the oldest part of the town and that where many business establishments are located; specifically, this part of Quebec City.

  See also: Low-Town  Upper Town  

  • 1711  (1920)  There is in Quebeck Town Two hundred and fifty men of ye Melitia, and One hundred and fifty soldiers in ye kings pay, two batteries in ye Lower Town. . . .
  • 1815  [Quebec City] is divided into the upper and lower town, although the elevation of one above the other is scarcely perceptible.
  • 1957  As it happened, I was jerked violently back into the twentieth century by a wild ride, with a mad taxi-driver, through the teeming labyrinth of Lower Town, where laundry hung and women gossiped between the noisome tenements . . . and tourists gaped at what they took to be the charming quaintness of a foreign civilization

• 2 Local in Ottawa, Ontario, that part of the city lying downstream from the point where the Rideau Canal meets the Ottawa River, nowadays a predominently French-Canadian district.

  • 1843  We were very much pleased to observe a substantial looking Pump, of the latest and most approved construction, has been inserted into the Public Well, in the Market Place Lower Town.
  • 1959  The area referred to in the Journal item (Sparks, between Elgin and Bank) is clearly downtown . . . Editor's note: . . . local custom has recognized a "lower town" and "up town." The "lower town" boundaries did not extend further west than Sussex Drive. The business area west of Sussex by common usage has been known as "up town"; this despite any lexicographer's definition.