Gotham

Before we go any further I feel I aught to step up to the lectern and try to drop some nuggets of knowledge. Maybe you've put together why I chose this title for my blog, maybe you haven't, but I wanted to talk about names and nicknames.

This will also give me a chance to reference the New York history book I've been reading for the past 3 months: Gotham, by Edwin Burrows. It weights more than a min- statuette of liberty, registering at over 1200 pages and only covers New York's history until the year 1898. Why 1898? I don't know, I made it to year 1830 and had to return it to the library. To get an idea of how complete this book is, ask yourself what you know about New York before the American Revolution? … me neither, but Mr. Burrows wrote a good 200 pages on it! He also explained a lot about names.

Gotham, New York's classier nickname, in some language or another translates to 'goat town', hardly an image that comes to mind when we think of the city today. First applied to the city by Washington Irving in A Short History of New York, the name refers to a funny little town in England, with two conflicting stories about itself. The first, is that everyone who lived in the town was crazy, nutso, off their medication – end of story, which seems a bit odd New Yorkers to accept as a namesake. The other story is that everyone in Gotham was really smart, but acted crazy so that the King wouldn't visit and claim all their beautiful land for his highway. This seems a more appropriate story for any city, let alone one that at times can seem misunderstood.

Over the years, I've heard and even dispensed a stream of disparaging statements about New York: Too dirty, too impersonal, too self centered, too many Yankee fans, too much poverty, just too much (which sounds like a lot of the complaints people have about China, except for that Yankee fan stuff). I'll admit that just 1 year ago I counted New York as a city I had no desire to live in for exactly the reasons enumerated above. Now that I'm here, and finding it quite to my liking I might add, I'm beginning to wonder about the old Gotham story. Maybe New York has convinced scores of kings (and common folk) that to live there you must be crazy, when really it's a pretty nice place.

Devious conspiracies aside, I feel learning the history of the names fills in a nice history to the places. It doesn't take a genius to realize New York is named after York, England, because the King's brother, and Duke of York, was given the charter for the city. More interesting is how the burros were names. In the 1600's Mr. Brock moved his family just across the river from the northern part of Manhattan and set up Bronk's farm, in an area now known as Da' Bronx. Brooklyn was named after something from Holland. And apparently nobody knows for certain how Manhattan got it's name, but my personal favorite is that it's Native American for 'The Drunken Place', due to a surely wild pow-wow between early explorers and footloose natives. I don't care if it's true, I just feel the name fills in a bit of the history.