Gotham City Quotes

Gotham City. Clean shafts of concrete and snowy rooftops. The work of men who died generations ago. From here, it looks like an achievement. From here, you can't see the enemy.

Riddler: You want to tell me who you killed and why? Catwoman: We didn’t kill anyone Poisson Ivy: Well, not yesterday

Harlem sleeps late.

We looked as if we’d been cobbled together in Photoshop, the three of us, walking to my husband’s funeral. One white middle-class mother, one skinny black refugee girl, and one small Dark Knight from Gotham City.

After all, Gotham's a city where angels fly on the wings of Icarus...Up, up they go and then...down, down, down they fall. Until we all stand, revealed for who we truly are underneath.

The New Your energy goes beyond anything you'll find anywhere else. It's too much for some people and it grinds them down, but it lifts up and animates the rest of us.

There's never been a duo of ladies to take on Gotham City.

His eyes flew back at me and I could see whole civilizations, cities that he'd built and cherished and planned for, like the model of an entire world, all crumbling.

Parents like to think of themselves as Batmans, and of their children as Gotham Cities. Gotham City depends on Batman for its survival, and Batman delivers. This belief prevents parents from letting those young adults actually live their lives.

Even before the letter he'd been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South.

A pause. “More are coming,” she repeated. “Worse than any of the criminal factions here. More powerful—and with a deadlier agenda. Keep your eyes open.” “Why warn me?” he demanded. That stillness settled over her again. “Because this city won’t survive them.” “And that’s not what you want?” She looked him over. Or he thought she did. “There are good people in Gotham. Protect them.

Every artist who drew Batman after creator Bob Kane was a better artist than Kane [...].

And he was the first crush I ever had that wasn't a scientist-- it's a different thing altogether. It made me a little peeved at myself, to be honest. Half the girls in Gotham City would have been happy just touching his jacket. I didn't want it to happen. But I'm human, all right? And for a while, we were better than kids with a crush. We were actually friends.

To keep the ugly cry-face on lock down, I directed my attention to my polished gold Krugerrand coin, which hung against my chest by a thin, twisted gold chain and flashed against my black blouse. It was my Batman signal, alerting the universe that I was in crisis and in desperate need of being rescued immediately, if not sooner. The coin's weight was also a reminder of the reason I'd moved to Gotham City. After all, it was a result of my great-aunt and her one-ounce gold-coin collection that afforded me the opportunity of the life I was leading.

Bane: We take Gotham from the corrupt! The rich! The oppressors of generations who have kept you down with myths of opportunity, and we give it back to you... the people. Gotham is yours. None shall interfere. Do as you please. Start by storming Blackgate, and freeing the oppressed! Step forward those who would serve. For and army will be raised. The powerful will be ripped from their decadent nests, and cast out into the cold world that we know and endure. Courts will be convened. Spoils will be enjoyed. Blood will be shed. The police will survive, as they learn to serve true justice. This great city... it will endure. Gotham will survive!

He also loved the city itself. Coming to and leaving Cousin Joe’s, he would gorge himself on hot dogs and cafeteria pie, price cigarette lighters and snap-brim hats in store windows, follow the pushboys with their rustling racks of furs and trousers. There were sailors and prizefighters; there were bums, sad and menacing, and ladies in piped jackets with dogs in their handbags. Tommy would feel the sidewalks hum and shudder as the trains rolled past beneath him. He heard men swearing and singing opera. On a sunny day, his peripheral vision would be spangled with light winking off the chrome headlights of taxicabs, the buckles on ladies’ shoes, the badges of policemen, the handles of pushcart lunch-wagons, the bulldog ornaments on the hoods of irate moving vans. This was Gotham City, Empire City, Metropolis. Its skies and rooftops were alive with men in capes and costumes, on the lookout for wrongdoers, saboteurs, and Communists. Tommy

As the Greeks have created the Olympus based upon their own image and resemblance, we have created Gotham City and Metropolis and all these galaxies so similar to the corporate world, manipulative, ruthless and well paid, that conceived them.

A change in direction was required. The story you finished was perhaps never the one you began. Yes! He would take charge of his life anew, binding his breaking selves together. Those changes in himself that he sought, he himself would initiate and make them. No more of this miasmic, absent drift. How had he ever persuaded himself that his money-mad burg would rescue him all by itself, this Gotham in which Jokers and Penguins were running riot with no Batman (or even Robin) to frustrate their schemes, this Metropolis built of Kryptonite in which no Superman dared set foot, where wealth was mistaken for riches and the joy of possession for happiness, where people lived such polished lives that the great rough truths of raw existence had been rubbed and buffed away, and in which human souls had wandered so separately for so long that they barely remembered how to touch; this city whose fabled electricity powered the electric fences that were being erected between men and men, and men and women, too? Rome did not fall because her armies weakened but because Romans forgot what being Roman meant. Might this new Rome actually be more provincial than its provinces; might these new Romans have forgotten what and how to value, or had they never known? Were all empires so undeserving, or was this one particularly crass? Was nobody in all this bustling endeavor and material plenitude engaged, any longer, on the deep quarry-work of the mind and heart? O Dream-America, was civilization's quest to end in obesity and trivia, at Roy Rogers and Planet Hollywood, in USA Today and on E!; or in million-dollar-game-show greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the eternal confessional booth of Ricki and Oprah and Jerry, whose guests murdered each other after the show; or in a spurt of gross-out dumb-and-dumber comedies designed for young people who sat in darkness howling their ignorance at the silver screen; or even at the unattainable tables of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Alain Ducasse? What of the search for the hidden keys that unlock the doors of exaltation? Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row of electric chairs, those dealers in death's democracy, where everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could come to die side by side? Who paved Paradise and put up a parking lot? Who settled for George W. Gush's boredom and Al Bore's gush? Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children were getting shot? What, America, of the Grail? O ye Yankee Galahads, ye Hoosier Lancelots, O Parsifals of the stockyards, what of the Table Round? He felt a flood bursting in him and did not hold back. Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused him, and its vast potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction. What he opposed in it he must also attack in himself. It made him want what it promised and eternally withheld. Everyone was an American now, or at least Americanized: Indians, Uzbeks, Japanese, Lilliputians, all. America was the world's playing field, its rule book, umpire, and ball. Even anti-Americanism was Americanism in disguise, conceding, as it did, that America was the only game in town and the matter of America the only business at hand; and so, like everyone, Malik Solanka now walked its high corridors cap in hand, a supplicant at its feast; but that did not mean he could not look it in the eye. Arthur had fallen, Excalibur was lost and dark Mordred was king. Beside him on the throne of Camelot sat the queen, his sister, the witch Morgan le Fay.

Gotham City. Donde los sueños se vuelven sólidos y sangran. Donde los fantasmas existen y los monstruos dejan las huellas de sus pisadas entre el polvo. Donde vive el hombre sin precio, el hombre que no puede ser comprado ni vendido, ni apartado de su singular rumbo.

But looking out, all he saw was an ocean of light, the shimmering heart of Gotham City spread out before him. He didn't know everything his future held for him, not yet, but he knew that whatever it was, it would remain here. It looked like a place worth protecting. It looked like home.

And what better place to sow vengeance—to, quite literally, turn Gotham into a City of Endless Night?

herself changes too. In current DC Comics continuity, Catwoman is a wealthy socialite named Selina Kyle, rather ambiguous in her aims. Sometimes she works with criminals and breaks the law and other times she allies with Batman or the Justice League and enforces it. Her domain is Gotham City’s East End, and she protects its residents through whatever means she sees fit.

I remember Uncle Boysie telling me that Canada was so safe the policemen wore nice red outfits and rode on horses but according to Roy the country was like Gotham City with crooks around every corner… I pictured them as shady Frank Miller characters with bulging muscles and machine guns poking out from trench coats but the photograph from the papers was of a group of boys my age. They kind of resembled some of my friends from Mayaro too.

right.” Inspired by mid-century architectural lettering of New York City, Gotham celebrates the alphabet’s most basic form. These qualities made Gotham the most popular release of recent years. It’s used everywhere, in logos, in magazines, in the very things that inspired it: signs. Gotham’s simplicity is not merely geometric — like Avenir, it feels more natural than mechanical. In fact, its lowercase shares a lot with Avenir’s, despite being much larger. But Gotham’s essence is in the caps: broad, sturdy “block” letters of very consistent

Many novelists fumed at men they saw as jailers. A host of masculine villains paraded through their plots—neglectful fathers, cruel husbands, and assorted gamblers, alcoholics, philanderers, failures, or murderers—with whom courageous and creative women did combat or from whom they fled.

It wasn’t Hell; only fools and drama queens throw that word around about a place like Gotham. It was worse, in a way, because it was manmade. There wasn’t any timeless malevolence behind it all, it was just… what human beings can descend to when they let themselves forget they can be heroes.

On New Year’s Eve 1777, after performing in a play entitled The Devil to Pay in the West Indies, a party of drunken officers—one dressed up like Old Nick himself, complete with horns and tail—disrupted services at the John Street Methodist Church. Nor was that the worst of it. “I could narrate many and very frightful occurrences of theft, fraud, robbery, and murder by the English soldiers which their love of drink excited,” said one dismayed German officer.

Rigorous admission procedures and hefty fees allowed the “worthy” to exclude the “uncouth in manners and habits, ignorant even of the English language, jostling and crowding and vulgarizing the profession.” A year after its formation, the self-selected and overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon Protestant founders had admitted only 450 out of New York’s approximately four thousand lawyers to their ranks. Grievance and screening committees were established to exercise some control over the behavior of attorneys and judges. The association’s pioneering effort at self-regulation was swiftly and widely copied throughout the country, and Manhattanites proved instrumental in forming the American Bar Association in 1878.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)—a strictly New York City concern despite its expansive name—had been founded in 1866 by Henry Bergh, son of wealthy shipbuilder Christian Bergh. Addressing a crowded Clinton Hall meeting of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, Bergh had denounced the cruelties practiced upon urban animals, particularly by the brutish (and Irish) lower classes, and urged New Yorkers to follow England’s example in tackling the problem organizationally and legislatively. The backing of wealthy bourgeois gentlemen (Astor, Fish, Belmont) and leading ministers (the Unitarian “Pope” Henry Bellows) won the ASPCA a charter and gained passage of restrictive laws, but the rank-and-file supporters of the organization were mainly middle class.

Despite these individual successes, which built on the prewar legislative victories that allowed wives to keep their own earnings, middle-class females in general found themselves repeatedly thwarted in efforts to crack male monopolization of professional positions. When three women applied to Columbia Law School, one trustee responded, “No woman shall degrade herself by practicing law, in New York especially, if I can save her.

Nor was her support for the urban realists a one-off affair. In 1907 she set up an apartment and studio in Greenwich Village, remodeling a stable at 19 MacDougal Alley, just north of Washington Square, and made it available for informal exhibitions. In 1914 she bought the adjacent building (8 West 8th Street) and established therein a professional gallery, the Whitney Studio,

Robert Underwood Johnson, should advocate “dignity, moderation and purity of expression” and oppose “vulgarity, sensationalism, meretriciousness, lubricity and other forms of degeneracy.” The academy should also resist “the tyranny of novelty,” said Johnson, and consider drawing up “well considered lists of words or meanings taboo.” Academicians inveighed against “polyglot corrupters” of Anglo-Saxon English, and insisted that fiction uplift coarse and sordid people, not describe them.

own independent exhibition, marketing it as an American Salon des Refusés. In February 1908 eight painters showcased their work at the Macbeth Galleries. The Eight, as critic James Huneker baptized them, included Henri, Sloan, Glackens, Luks, and Shinn—the Philadelphia Five—and three others, stylistically different but equally determined to crack open NAD’s restrictive practices: symbolist Arthur B. Davies (who was well wired into wealthy New York collector circles), Impressionist/realist Ernest Lawson, and Postimpressionist Maurice Prendergast. (Davies and Lawson had been among the blackballed in 1907.)

Now the tires screeched in protest as Bruce hit another sharp turn. "I heard that," said Alfred Pennyworth from the car's live video touch screen. He gave Bruce a withering look. "A bit slower on the turns, Master Wayne." "Aston Martins weren't made for slow turns, Alfred." "They weren't made to be wrecked, either." Bruce smiled sidelong at his guardian. The setting sun glinted off his aviator glasses as he turned the car back in the direction of Gotham City's skyscrapers. "No faith in me at all, Alfred," he said lightly. "You're the one who taught me how to drive in the first place." "And did I teach you to drive like a demon possessed?" "A demon possessed with skills, Bruce clarified. He spun the steering wheel in a smooth motion.

a nostalgic belief that New York City had been a far better place just after the Revolution, and a conviction that the evils now afflicting it—rising rates of crime, pauperism, and immorality—were foreign imports.

Nobody chased her. But that was nobody's fault, really, not in a city of this size. It was only the callousness of four hundred thousand people, blending into a single blue-black pool of unconcern. That's what we copper stars are for, I think... to be the few who stop and look.

Residents grimly spoke of the crisis as “O Grab Me”—“embargo” spelled backward.

An eccentric Connecticut whaling captain named Preserved Fish and his cousin-partner Joseph Grinnell shifted from hawking New Bedford whale oil to running the Swallowtail line.

As George Francis Train boasted in 1857, it was “the locomotive of these United States,” pulling the rest of the nation faster and faster into the future: “twenty miles an hour—thirty—forty”!2

Confluence didn’t guarantee connection, and indeed could underscore its absence.

The really polished New Yorker, as editor Walter Whitman noted in an 1856 “Advice to Strangers” piece, was one who could coolly respond to a con man’s pitch by looking him in the eye and saying: “You’ve waked up the wrong passenger.

Taverns, and the dozens of dramshops that catered to seamen and the laboring classes, were often run by widows who received free licenses from the Common Council, an inexpensive form of relief. Women were also prominent in the retail shops that boomed after the late 1720s. The Widow Lebrosses carried Canary wine and olive oil in her store at Hanover Square, the city’s shopping center, while the Widow Vanderspiegel and her son sold imported window glass. Mrs. Edwards started a cosmetics business in 1736, offering “An admirable Beautifying Wash, for Hands Face and Neck, it makes the Skin soft, smooth and plump, it likewise takes away Redness, Fredkles, Sun-Burnings, or Pimples.” The continuing role of women in trade, English as well as Dutch, promoted a certain feistiness among their ranks that ran contrary to prescriptions for proper female behavior.

Citing Poe’s celebrity—everybody was “raven-mad about his last poem”—Briggs took him on as junior partner.

The city’s first nonsectarian cemetery—its 156 underground vaults were open to the wealthy of any faith—was situated on a half-acre plot just west of Second Avenue between Second and Third streets. An inscription blazoned on its east wall read PLACE OF BURIAL FOR GENTLEMEN.

Many garbed themselves appropriately for their impending transformation into angels by purchasing the “White Muslin for Ascension Robes” advertised in Bowery dry-goods stores.

Gentlemen, for their part, were warned against offering their seat to the newly arrived lady—body warmth was offensive

Next, to ensure the popular acclaim that would overwhelm resistance from corrupt politicians, Beach installed a gas-lit entryway, a platform with frescoed walls, settees, and a grand piano, and a luxuriously upholstered twenty-two-person car. In February 1870 a huge rotary blower began propelling passengers smoothly back and forth—a public relations triumph that drew four hundred thousand riders that year, at twenty-five cents each. Nevertheless, the combination of Tweed’s opposition, protests from powerful Broadway landlords who feared for their buildings’ foundations, technical difficulties, and reluctance of private investors to undertake the enterprise led to its demise.

Before the war, five-stories was the rule, and commercial life was carried on primarily at ground level—in streets and showrooms, at sales counters, on exchange floors. After the war, office buildings went vertical, climbing to unprecedented heights—six stories, seven, eight. “Our business men are building up to the clouds,” one newsman exclaimed. The elevator made this possible. Lift technology had improved since the vertical screw used at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Now the “steam and drum” method was available. Steel wire cables were run over a drum at the top of the shaft, which was then revolved to raise or lower the cab. An alternative model hauled the cage up and down the shaft by looping its wire cable over a pulley, then attaching a wrought-iron bucket almost as weighty as the cage. When filled with water from a tank, the bucket descended by gravity, pulling the cage up. At the bottom, an operator emptied the bucket, shifting the weight balance in favor of the cage, which then descended and pulled the bucket back up.

By 1857 there were at least 112 publishers in New York City. While most were “respectable” houses, emphasizing genteel, religious, and domestic literature, others catered to a rougher readership. These outfits churned out blood-and-thunder adventures, sadomasochistic romances laced with sex and horror, and lurid accounts of patrician villainy or plebeian roguery.

Carnally inclined males kept abreast of the possibilities by perusing handbooks such as Charles DeKock’s Guide to the Harems, Free Lovyer’s [sic] Directory of the Seraglios, and Butt Ender’s Prostitution Exposed.

These boozy and licentious variety halls thrived on the patronage of civil War soldiers on furlough, prompting moralists to persuade the city to require in 1862 that all theatrical and musical performing spaces be licensed and that the sale of liquor and employment of “waitresses” be banned wherever a curtain separated performers from customers. Entrepreneurs of leisure promptly dove through this loophole by inaugurating nightspots that featured a raised platform in the rear, a piano, and an open dance floor surrounded by tables and chairs.

Fashion dictated the demise of the crinoline and the birth of the bustle. Dresses (both day and evening) gradually flattened in front while gathering at the back, assisted by the bustle, a half-cage or puff filled with horsehair or stiffened gauze and net. (This was not a new invention, having been favored in the eighteenth century, when it was known more forthrightly as a “false bum.”)

When the popular actor John Hodgkinson appeared in the red coat of a British officer, hecklers wouldn’t allow him to continue until he had explained, at length, that he was merely playing the part of an unworthy character. Between

Uppertendom seemed even more problematic to the petite bourgeoisie, newly enlarged and newly self-conscious, which the boom had summoned into being. New York’s middling strata would split on the luxury issue, some opting for fierce republican disapproval, others for fawning emulation. Most, however, sought to carve out a position that, while drawing the line at aristocratic frippery, nevertheless sought to find some common ground with the city’s most powerful people, ground they discerned in the theory and practice of “respectability.

Moments later Hamilton had a second confrontation with prominent opponents of the treaty, shouting that he would “fight the whole party one by one . . . the whole detestable faction.

William Mitchell followed suit, halving his Olympic Theater’s admission prices and focusing almost exclusively on what he called “tragico-comico-illegitimate” productions: travesties of local events, topical commentaries, and Shakespearean burlesque (Julius Sneezer and Dars-de-Money). Shipbuilders

Crime stories were paralleled in popularity by the occasional hoaxes the paper concocted. In August 1835 Day began publishing a series of articles recounting life on the moon—spherical amphibians rolling about—as supposedly revealed by a powerful new telescope.

Among other wonders, the Fifth Avenue offered private bathrooms, an unprecedented extravagance, as well as the city’s second passenger elevator (equipped with Otis’s safety device), described variously as a “perpendicular railway intersecting each story” or “a little parlour going up by machinery.

Warner took to writing in hopes of making money and submitted a pious and sentimental novel to Harpers, which rebuffed it with the single word “Fudge.

Widows (though not widowers) were expected to wear mourning for two years, just as, in general, the burdens of refinement fell most heavily on women.

Poe had invented a genre—the detective story—that played upon but in the end relieved his readers’ urban anxieties. Social order was possible after all, Poe implied, if authorities adopted scientific methods of investigation and control. The detective, embodiment of this reassuring message, became a fixture on the urban literary scene.

At first, Third Avenue El passengers bound for the Bronx could only transfer—for a separate fare—to the socalled Huckleberry Line, a horsecar that meandered along the Annexed District’s Third Avenue so slowly that passengers could hop off, pick huckleberries in the fields, and reboard the same car.

Horace Greeley cautioned one upstate hopeful: “You do not realize how little the mere talent of writing well has to do with success or usefulness. There are a thousand at least in this city who can write very good prose or verse,” he added, “while there are not fifty who can earn their bread by it.

Political editors were a truculent breed. Leggett’s boss, William Cullen Bryant, took a cowskin whip to William Leete Stone of the Commercial Advertiser in 1831, who riposted with a sword cane, a thrust Bryant parried with his whip until onlookers broke them apart. In 1836 James Watson Webb would assault James Gordon Bennet in the middle of Wall Street. By

During Christmas, when Macy’s stayed open till eleven, male clerks would often not bother going home but curl up in their bluish-gray uniforms and sleep on the counters.

Spurned by the upper class, Wood garnered support from the organized workers. Ira B. Davis denounced the Wall Street Democratic renegades, noting that none had objected when the state government bailed out the banks: apparently what was “virtuous in them” was “a crime in Mayor Wood or the workingmen.

In the early 1870s Feltman, a German immigrant, had opened a shanty stand at the beach and begun selling clam roasts, ice cream, lager beer, and what Harper’s would call a “weird-looking sausage, muffled up in the two halves of a roll and smoking hot from the vender’s grid-iron.

From Feltman’s, they might have walked to see the Elephant, a wood-framed, tinskinned hotel, 150 feet long and 122 feet high. It had thirty-four rooms in its head, stomach, and feet, a cigar store in one foreleg, a diorama in the other, and a dairy stand in its trunk.

Edison brimmed over with moneymaking ideas for the phonograph. He licensed two Brooklyn men to incorporate it into clocks and watches that would call out the time, wake people up, and emit advertising messages. He groped toward stereo by working up a two-sided disk, both sides of which could be played simultaneously. He aimed to marketan educational toy phonograph that would help children learn the alphabet. And to promote the new machine in the most colossal manner possible, Edison proposed that when the Statue of Liberty finally rose on Bedloe’s Island, a phonograph be put in its mouth so that it could talk and whistle to ships passing by in the harbor.

When Barnum’s American Museum burned down in July of 1865—a spectacular blaze, which left a dead whale in the street for two days—Bennett decided to erect a showpiece building on its Broadway and Ann Street site.

The key to success in the Gold Room was information. Knowledge of a battle’s outcome obtained an hour before one’s competitors could be parlayed into a phenomenal fortune. At first, brokers haunted the wire services. Then they built their own: by 1863 private wires brought military results to New York’s financial district before they reached Lincoln in the White House.

By 1864 Wall Streeters had spies in the Confederate high command and could learn southern battle plans before colonels in the Army of Virginia did.

Appropriately enough, in the years following Pulitzer’s coup, the term “skyscraper” first gained common currency. It was not a novel word, having had a long history of other associations. Since the eighteenth century it had been used to describe the triangular sails, set above the royals in calm latitudes, called skyscrapers or moonrakers due to their great height.

But Comstock, who considered Bennett “everything vile in Blasphemy and Infidelism,” nailed him for mailing an “obscene” scientific pamphlet (How do Marsupials Propagate?) and in 1879 got a landmark decision against him.

beaver testicles, rubbed on the forehead or dried and dissolved in water, made an effective antidote to drowsiness and idiocy.

It was becoming somewhat more difficult, too, to open a “public house” or tavern for the sale of liquor. Municipal authorities now requested applicants for a license to present a certificate attesting they were “of good life & Conversation and fitt to keep such a house.

Nothing made it harder for Europeans to see the link between the Lenapes and their environment than the fact that kinship—not class—was the basis of their society. Private ownership of land and the hierarchical relations of domination and exploitation familiar in Europe were unknown in Lenapehoking. By custom and negotiation with its neighbors, each Lenape band had a “right” to hunt, fish, and plant within certain territorial limits. It might, in exchange for gifts, allow other groups or individuals to share these territories, but this did not imply the “sale” or permanent alienation known to European law. In the absence of states, moreover, warfare among the Lenapes was much less systematic and brutal than among Europeans. As Daniel Denton said disdainfully: “It is a great fight where seven or eight is slain.” More

Blackbirders”—stalkers who were not above seizing free blacks and shipping them into slavery—began prowling the city on a regular basis. Their only opposition consisted of sporadic and spontaneous riots by local African Americans. In 1819 forty blacks on Barclay Street tried and failed to rescue a man being taken by a slavecatcher and a city marshal to a Hudson River steamboat dock. In 1826 blacks bombarded a slavecatcher giving evidence at City Hall with bricks, sticks, and stones but were suppressed by the police and given severe sentences.

State Senator Kemble made a speech opposing any enlargement of the NY&H’s capital. When the news of impending scarcity hit Wall Street, the price of Harlem stock rose. At the top of the market, Kemble’s broker sold short. Kemble then pushed a bill through the legislature enlarging Harlem’s capital, and the price plummeted. As these were early days, and such behavior was still considered inappropriate, Kemble was expelled from the Senate.

Charleston’s postmaster had asked New York City’s postmaster, Samuel Gouveneur, to extract antislavery tracts from his southbound mail. Gouveneur agreed and informed the postmaster general that he planned to deny postal access to Tappan and his colleagues. The issue went up to Andrew Jackson, who informally authorized Gouveneur’s embargo on “offensive papers” and explicitly denounced the AASS in his Annual Message. For the moment, the abolitionists were stymied.

On the night of February 25, vowing to “wipe the mouths of the savages,” he launched a surprise attack on the Pavonia encampment. Company troops massacred scores of men, women, and children, Wiechquaesgecks as well as Hackensacks. At daybreak, wrote David De Vries, the exulting soldiers returned to Manhattan with stories of how infants were “torn from their mother’s breasts, and hacked to pieces in the presence of the parents, and the pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to small boards, were cut, stuck, and pierced, and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone.” Some of the victims, De Vries added, “came to our people in the country with their hands, some with their legs cut off, and some holding their entrails in their arms.” Volunteers attacked a smaller Wiechquaesgeck camp at Corlear’s Hook, the bulge on the East River side of Manhattan, with similar results. The heads of more than eighty victims were brought back to New Amsterdam for display, and Kieft made a little speech congratulating his forces on their valor.

Salvation arrived in the person of John Underhill, a hard-drinking, short-tempered Indian fighter renowned for his brutality in the Pequot War of 1637 as well as for a pamphlet extolling the charms of New Netherland. Underhill and a small contingent of New England troops rallied the Dutch over the winter of 1643-44, attacking Indian villages in Connecticut, on Staten Island, and on Long Island, killing hundreds and taking many prisoners. Some of the captives were brought back to the fort, and an eyewitness reported that Kieft “laughed right heartily, rubbing his right arm and laughing out loud” as they were tortured and butchered by his soldiers. The soldiers seized one, “threw him down, and stuck his private parts, which they had cut off, into his mouth while he was still alive, and after that placed him on a mill-stone and beat his head off.” Secretary Van Tienhoven’s mother-in-law allegedly amused herself all the while by kicking the heads of other victims about like footballs. In a later raid on an Indian camp near Pound Ridge in Westcheser, Underhill and the Anglo-Dutch force were said to have slaughtered somewhere between five hundred and seven hundred more with a loss of only fifteen wounded.

KENNEL, YE SONS OF BITCHES!

This is not to say that history repeats itself. Time is not a carousel on which we might, next time around, snatch the brass ring by being better prepared. Rather we see the past as flowing powerfully through the present and think that charting historical currents can enhance our ability to navigate them.

even reluctant curiosity would give way to habit, and habit to dependency.

And among the prissiest. Gilder’s method of raising public standards of taste and morality required the production of bloodless pages. As custodian of genteel culture he sought out the delicate and the refined and stood guard against the vulgar and the vernacular. Walt Whitman, though a personal friend, was banned from the Century’s pages; a bit of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn snuck in, but only after Gilder deleted references to nakedness, blasphemy, and smells and emended all improper phraseology (changing “in a sweat” to “worrying”).

pollution and public health. In 1908 Gotham’s 120,000 horses deposited 60,000 gallons of urine and 2.5 million pounds of manure on the city streets every day.

Hoop skirts blocked traffic, which is why Mme. Demorest’s Imperial “dress-elevator” was immensely popular: its weighted strings allowed women to raise or lower their skirts at will, thus clearing New York’s mud and slush.

But that isolated coup was as nothing compared to the body of work sustained over years by George Leonidas Leslie (or Western George, as he was known) and his colleagues. This Ohio immigrant lived a remarkable double life. At one moment he was an independently wealthy man-about-town, known for his impeccable manners, his tailoring, his love of books, and his membership in several excellent clubs. At other moments he headed a highly sophisticated gang of bank robbers whose careful preparations—obtaining architect’s plans of the building under scrutiny, or constructing special burglars’ tools—helped pull off perhaps a hundred jobs like the robbery, in 1869, of the Ocean National Bank at Greenwich and Fulton, which netted them over threequarters of a million dollars. Beginning in 1875, Western George spent three years preparing for his master heist, a knockover of the Manhattan Savings Institution on Bleecker and Broadway, arrangements that included purchasing a duplicate of the Manhattan’s vault in order to ferret out its weak spots.

When the North Atlantic Squadron steamed into New York harbor on September 29, 1899—its progress upriver marked by a Journal balloon that released showers of colorcoded confetti over Grant’s Tomb—it touched off two days of frenzied adulation.

In the symphonic world, musically inclined industrialists and financiers were having problems of a different sort with the New York Philharmonic. The old German cooperative presented only half a dozen concerts each year. As the orchestra couldn’t guarantee members full time work, they spent most of their time playing at balls and dances; hence their performances were less than highly polished, though much improved after Theodore Thomas was taken on as conductor. Neither their less than professional standards nor traditional repertoire bothered old-fashioned elites, but both failed to satisfy new tycoons. A capitalist combine including Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Carnegie underwrote a rival, the New York Symphony Orchestra (1878), another Leopold Damrosch project. Orchestra war ensued. In one notable sally Damrosch stole the American premiere of Brahms’s First Symphony from under Thomas’s nose.

A string of city histories appeared, some in the elegiac vein pioneered by Abram Dayton’s Last Days of Knickerbocker New York (1882), others works of substantial scholarship, much though not all of it written by women. Martha Lamb’s History of the City of New York was published beginning in 1877; in 1884, Benson J. Lossing published his two-volume History of New York City; and Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer penned historical essays for Century Magazine, which prefigured her later two-volume study of the seventeenth-century city.

Gotham City isn’t like anywhere else,” Dr. Leland said with a faint, sad smile. “People who come here from other, more conventional cities find it hard to understand our brand of normal.

Yeah, that was how they rolled in Gotham City, the world’s biggest cult, where everyone was brainwashed to worship Batman and hate anybody he hated. Anyone who didn’t was declared criminal or crazy and ended up in Iron Heights or Arkham Asylum while Batman flitted around town, cosplaying and ego-tripping.

Gotham City made criminals via its own special recipe—one part felony, one part cosplay—

As Bruce would write later that night, “A signal now, for when I’m needed. But when the light hits the sky, it’s not just a call. It’s a warning. To them.” A masked figure dressed in black stepped into the dim light of Gotham City. “I am the shadows. I am vengeance. I am…” The Batman.

Yes. Big as the moon over Gotham City. And every psychopath, sociopath, sadist, alcoholic, narcissist piece of shit anywhere can see it and comes running. And when the two find each other, they click. They recognize each other on some deep level. It’s like they speak two variations of the same language.

I've been thinking of this guy my whole life. And his universe. Not Batman's Gotham City or Superman's Metropolis or Captain America's New York or Green Lantern's Coast City or Antman's L.A. I'm discussing Smallville, where Superman's nice fosters looked after him till the day he got his wings and tore out of there. I recall some ripping up of pages, as a kid reading that. Not even understanding really why it broke my heart. But Jesus, even a kid knows the basics. Why wouldn't any of them want to look after us?

Growing up means realizing that The Joker, Riddler, and Harley Quinn are the sane response to the dumpster fire that is Gotham City. The guy dressing up like a bat is only prolonging the problem. Gotham can't be saved.

The transition from competitive to corporate capitalism, and the emergence of Wall Street bankers as organizers of the industrial economy, created new facts on the ground. On the one hand, the tremendous concentration of power gave even greater cause for worry about individual malfeasance. But on the other, the magnitude and complexity of the new economy seemed to transcend the ability of any set of actors to control it.