Gotham City (New York)
Gotham City is a nickname for the American metropolis New York .
The American writer Washington Irving used the term "Gotham City" for the first time as a nickname for the east coast metropolis of New York in his collection of essays Salmagundi, or the Whims and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff and Others . Based on the popular legend of the Wise Men of Gotham (see Gotham (Nottinghamshire) ) or to the 15th century by the Carthusian Monk Andrew Borde satirical written collection of stories entitled The Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham insinuated he that New Yorkers like her are self-important and foolish. In his work A History of New York Irving used the term again for New York. The negative connotation of the word Gotham was lost over time, so that Gotham remained as a neutral epithet of New York. By the mid-19th century at the latest, “Gotham” had established itself as a parallel name for New York City.
Edgar Allan Poe's 1844 report on everyday life in New York, which he called Doings of Gotham , shows how naturalized the term was . In contrast to Irving or the authors of the Batman stories (see Gotham City (Comics) ), he was less concerned with the threatening atmosphere of the streets, but emphasized above all that they were "insufferably dirty". The local baseball team also called itself New York Gothams in its founding years from 1883 to 1885 , before changing its name to Giants. The Danish-born photographer and journalist Jacob August Riis also used the term in his How the Other Half Lives (1890). The writer O. Henry named New York City, the location of his stories published shortly after the turn of the century, also Gotham, for example in the story Man About Town from the collection The Four Million .
Individual evidence
- ↑ oA "Gotham", June 10, 1902 in: Barre Evening Telegram ( Barre, Vt. ) Page 6, column 3
- ↑ CHRONICLING AMERICA - Historic American Newspapers , keyword: " Gotham "