Batman's "wise" home and a great day in jazz

I got wondering this week about where “Gotham” comes from. It has been a notable nickname for New York City for a long time, but what else? We all know that Gotham City is the fictional home of Batman in DC Comics, but I suspected it went back a lot further than that. And apparently it goes back a lot further!

It has multiple origins. Washington Irving used it to describe New York City in his satirical periodical Salmagundi in 1807, but the. true origins of the term go back even further than this!

Irving’s use of the term comes from the “Wise Men of Gotham”, an apocryphal story that goes back nearly 1,000 years. The story suggests that the people of Gotham in Nottinghamshire, England, pretended to be idiots in order to avoid having King John visit (so that’s 1199-1216!) Because any road the King used had to be declared a public highway, they didn’t want such a thing through their town, so this was the way they decided to avoid the visit! Apparently it worked, which is why they became known as “wise men”. If only we could all avoid Royal Visits with this method now!

But in a much more inspiring vein, there was a legendary photograph taken in 1958, known as “A Great Day in Harlem” of 58 jazz legends who all met at the same time outside the same address on east 126th Street. The photographer Art Kane pitched the photo idea to Esquire Magazine at the time, despite not previously being a professional photographer! There are several short documentaries out there about the day.