Preface
Novelty is quite possibly the most overrated virtue of the modern era.
As someone who spent a good ten years working to acquire his doctorate, and another twenty years to secure a tenured, full professorship at one of the best liberal arts colleges in New England, I would know. The academy insists on new entrants to its ranks being able to prove their worth by convincingly proposing some new sentiment about their field. These new sentiments tend to possess the common virtue of never having been proposed before, the actual worth of these propositions be damned.
In other words, the modern academy suffers from what C.S. Lewis identified as a literally devilish fear of "the same old thing." Despite the reforms to national education policy in recent years which have reigned in the academy's worst excesses, this abhorrence for rhythm and contentment remains. Today's academics still blanch at the idea that their chief duties lie in preserving and propagating the relatively small, concise body of wisdom which the West has inherited, discovered, or clarified over the centuries in different contexts. As Ecclesiastes famously noted, "There is nothing new under the sun." It also states, quite bluntly: "Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh." That has not stopped the academy from trying to go against these bits of wisdom anyway.
But to be honest, I do find that this obsession with newness has helped to draw serious attention to genuinely significant developments in some areas of study, namely the life sciences, but also history. This particular social science lends itself to the learning of new things. This is because history is the art of examining things of the past. We are always getting more of the past and there is no shortage of it already, if only because the present has yet to cease.
I am a criminologist by training and a historian by profession, specializing in the study of the colorful heroes and villains of early twenty-first century Gotham City, New Jersey. And despite my above complaints, I believe I do indeed have something new to say about the City of the Bat.
I think it was Abraham Lincoln biographer Allen Guelzo who once said that the best biographies and history books focus on a specific part of the subject which they observe. This maxim addresses another woeful preoccupation of modern scholarship: definitiveness. This desire on the part of authors to have expressed the final, comprehensive, landmark word on whatever subject they tackle is not a good thing. It has resulted in the endless production of voluminous tomes which frequently dissuade new readers who are intimidated by the high page-count. Either that, or they are bored to death from needless exposition of mountains of minutia, and thus put down the book without getting a chance to find out what is useful or interesting about the subject.
With all that in mind, I am proud to say that this book is by no means novel or "definitive." It is a general survey of the forces which made Gotham City into the place it is today. Other authors have done more research than I have on, for instance, its origins in the colonial era, or its goings-on before, during, and after the Civil War, or its more recent history in regards to the Batman. I seek only to exposit, with the help of sources and information both new and old, what that great city is and how it came to be.
Though this book does contain much new information previously unavailable to scholars studying the history of Gotham City, it is also limited by the unavailability of certain other key sources which have been lost or destroyed. Such limitations are all combined with my resolution to make this short history of Gotham City just that: short.
One of the editors for this book mentioned to me that in the best fantasy and science-fiction stories, the setting is the most important element. This contrasts with literary fiction or detective stories where, he says, the most important parts are the characters and the plot. But in fantasy and science-fiction, the setting is almost a character in and of itself, shaping the players in the drama and influencing their actions and goals. This is clearly the case for Gotham City.
This friendly colleague of mine also maintains that life is not like one specific genre. He once told me something like this: "Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel."
I almost disagree with my friend's observation in the case of Gotham. But only almost.
This city, the largest in New Jersey, is marked by a gaudy, sordid history, both in recent times and in its early years. Its famous penchant for the extreme has only become more noticeable in the last forty-plus years due to the advent of new tools of mass communication. As stated above, my primary reason for writing this book is to determine why it possesses such a remarkable personality.
But in most respects, Gotham it is just like any other twenty-first century big city on the American east coast. It's not always horrifying, not always romantic, not always tragic, not always comical, and above all, not always unusual. It's generally epitomized by the diversity of the mundane, in the manner that my savvy editor described. It's more than possible to live there, to become accustomed to the local environment, and consider what you see there normal. This is because living in Gotham is almost always unremarkable, at least in the sense that most other residents of American big cities would mean by the notion.
My journey in writing this book led me to interview dozens of people, including professors, journalists, police officers, politicians, religious leaders, national guardsmen, firemen, prison inmates, businessmen, local healthcare professionals, citizen activists, city, county, and state officials, the executors of the Wayne, Cobblepot, and Kane estates, executives at Wayne Enterprises, the staff of the Gotham City Public Library, and the staff of the Gotham City Historical Society.
In addition to conducting all of these interviews, I also poured over newspaper archives, letters, journals, diaries, archival TV footage, and dozens of out-of-print books. But there are many other sources of information detailing the city's history which are tragically lost to us.
During No Man's Land, for instance, hundreds of books from the Gotham City Public Library were looted and then burnt as campfire fuel. These included a rare copy of Ned Dillon's annotated diary of Cyrus Pinkney, and certain other tomes which would have shed light on the social history of Gotham City during the period between 1895 and the outbreak of the Second World War. Destroyed during the Judgement on Gotham debacle in 2020 was a truck carrying a collection of passenger lists from the Port of Gotham City dating from the early 1900s. The truck, bound for the J. Devlin Davenport Immigration Museum, was in a parking garage which was leveled during that episode. No one was hurt, but the manifests were obliterated, possibly including the immigration records of the entire extended family of mafia don Alfredo Bertinelli. Such persons played a significant role in the political and criminal environment of Gotham during that time. Thus, the destruction of such records has made it even more difficult to locate links to living memory of that era.
But despite these setbacks to historians concerned with the subject, there are still plenty of resources of all kinds readily available for scholars to analyze. The Gotham City Museum of Natural History has preserved dozens of relics, mementos, and a copious amount of written records having to do with the city's history in the colonial era. I recall seeing there a sword said to have been owned by Jon Logerquist, the Norwegian mercenary who helped establish Gotham Colony in the seventeenth century. Meanwhile, the quirky, kind, funny devotees who staff the Gotham City Historical Society were able to supply me with the diary of Theodore Cobblepot, great-grandfather of Oswald. They also arranged for me to conduct an interview with Aubrey James, Jr., who had much to say about his father, the late Aubrey James, Sr., who was mayor of Gotham City during the late 1980s.
With all of this information at my disposal, first, second, and third-hand, I could easily have written hundreds of pages so as to assemble a "definitive" history of Gotham City. But I have refrained from doing so.
The old saying "less is more" is indeed quite true. Therefore, I have limited this book's overall scope and direction to determining, for lack of better phrasing, what makes Gotham tick. I have dispensed with fully examining the back-room dealings of its political scene during the Gilded Age, though there is plenty of information available on the subject. I only tangentially discuss the complex dynamics surrounding the various personalities of the Falcone and Maroni crime families, though such a thing would no doubt be of interest to aficionados of Mafia lore. Indeed, I myself find such nuances engrossing, but a complete study of the subject is not pertinent to the goal of this book.
Most importantly of all, I have not worked to expound upon the personal, hidden struggles of the Bat-Family with some of its most notable foes. Such conflicts, in the grand scheme of things, have little to do with the overall history of Gotham during the years in which such skirmishes occurred. I refer of course to the intriguing but irrelevant affairs now being revealed piecemeal by the Wayne estate. These include the fiasco where Bruce Wayne was nearly convicted of murder; most of the various episodes involving Ra's al Ghul, David Cain, and Thomas "Hush" Elliot; and the majority of the long string of similarly extraneous incidents which occurred during the Batman's fight against the Black Glove. In short, Gotham is not defined by the Bat, despite the almost supernatural association which the World's Greatest Detective has with that city. What follows this preface is therefore written with such a philosophy in mind.
Before we begin, it is important to remember this book's objective: To illustrate to a general audience just how Gotham City came to be like it is today. Furthermore, this book is meant to dispel the exaggerated reputation the city has as an epicenter of the dangerous and the macabre. It is certainly true that in the thirty-or-so years before the coming of the Batman, Gotham City was a very scary place. It would often return to being so during the periods when the Caped Crusader was absent from the scene. But as discussed above, this attribute does not even come close to totally defining its nature.
I'd also like to note once more that every small book has a huge battery of large books behind it. A perusal of the bibliography at the back of this volume should more than attest to that. The hours-upon-hours of recorded audio from the many personal interviews I conducted have also provided me with an untold amount of additional information, which might just find their way into other books in the future. I look forward to authoring such books should this one be successful.
Lastly, the limits I have imposed on the length and depth of this book must not be taken as a stodgy concession meant to placate not-so-voracious readers. The point of this book, including the limits I have willfully imposed on its relative size and scope, is to summarize and survey its subject while elucidating and expositing its goal, that is, to describe Gotham's evolution into its present condition. It is a general history meant both to appeal to a mass audience and to concisely examine one major element of that history in a way that will benefit professional criminologists and historians. Again, my goal is not definitiveness, but usefulness.
Taken together, it is my sincere hope that the nature of this book, the new and unique information that it does possess, combined with the limitations I have built into it, will help to communicate to the layman and lettered alike a most interesting and adventurous account of a most interesting and adventurous location. I hope to do this while also signaling to the greater academic establishment that it is more than acceptable for its members to author works concerning their respective specialties which are popular and accessible while also being studied and literate. Indeed, such activity is without doubt imperative in many cases.
Now, let us embark on the study of a dream. It is a true dream, part nightmare but chiefly fantasy, yet also the stark reality experienced by tens of millions of people of all walks of life. None of them dream the same dream, but they all have one thing in common: that dream has a name.
And that name is Gotham City.
William Cohen
Calvin College
Calvin City, CT
April 2043