Holy Gotham, Batman didn’t invent the name
September 12th, 2008
During the time of King John (1147-1216), there was a village in southern England called Gotham. According to writers Jerome Agel and Walter D. Glanze, Gotham gained notoriety because its citizens “were said to have feigned stupidity so that the king would not want to come and live in that area.†The label was first bestowed on New York by Washington Irving in a letter of February 13, 1807, in the Salmagundi Papers: “Oh! Gotham, Gotham! most enlightened of cities!” Eight million people later, it seems the nickname has done precious little to stop anyone from wanting to live in Irving’s native city.
