Gotham as an alias to New York City, dates back to an 1807 issue of Washington Irving‘s satirical periodical Salmagundi ,which lampooned New York culture and politics.
Washington Irving was a short story writer, famous for works like “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
These works were both a part of “The Sketch Book,” a collection of short stories.
Washington Irving has been called the father of the American short story and one of America’s first international literary stars.
Washington Irving, was inspired to use the Gotham as an allusion to the Wise Men of Gotham, an old English folk story which illuminates the eponymous village of Gotham, Nottinghamshire, England.
The village’s name derives from Old English gāt ‘goat’ and hām “home”, literally “homestead where goats are kept”.
In brief, the tale revolves around a village that decided to avoid hosting a passing king by acting stupidly.
In this sense the tale of Gotham was passed down in two main manners of significance:
a place full of idiots and fools and a shrewd display of cunning, which is originally, how the label applied to the supposedly pompous and self-absorbed New Yorkers and the second which led them to adopt the nickname.
Other cities might boast ancient traditions (Trojan refugees seemingly having nothing better to do than found famous cities) but New York, claimed Irving, was the ‘renowned and ancient city of Gotham’, the city of fools.
Washington Irving’s journal Salmagundi first uses the term in 1807 to skewer his fellow citizens, mocking their airs – in it were published essays concerning events in “the thrice renowned and delectable city of Gotham”.
New York Times columnist William Safire described Gotham City as “New York below 14th Street, from SoHo to Greenwich Village, the Bowery, Little Italy, Chinatown, and the sinister areas around the base of the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges.”
In terms of sources, the story of the Wise Men is common enough and Irving’s writings are available online. Most of the above however is derived from Burrows and Wallace’s excellent and aptly named Gotham.
(Irving had history, pun intended, in this form of mock-history. His History of New York similarly played fast-and-loose with the murkiness of the city’s history, popularizing the term Knickerbocker in the process.)
He made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. moving to England for the family business in 1815, he achieved international fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., serialized from 1819–20.
He continued to publish regularly—and almost always successfully—throughout his life, and just eight months before his death (at age 76, in Tarrytown, New York), completed a five-volume biography of George Washington.
Irving reminisced in his old age, how he used to watch ships in the docks, and as he looked at the sails, he imagined where they would go and what they might see.
Several of Washington Irving’s older brothers became active New York merchants, and they encouraged their younger brother’s literary aspirations, often supporting him financially as he pursued his writing career.
The crime of piracy on the high seas was a federal offense and common enough to occupy the minds of federal authorities.
While the city banned public executions, the federal government continued to offer such grotesque displays to New Yorkers for a few more years on a small island it controlled in the harbor.
19th-century New Yorkers knew the place as Gibbet Island, but under another name it would later become one of the most famous islands in the nation: Ellis Island. However, its early history can best be described as ignominious.
Pirates bring to mind images of eye-patched swashbucklers, skull-and-crossbones flags, and loads of treasure, but real-life piracy was a more mundane, if still violent, pastime.
When caught for their crimes, pirates often faced a death sentence. Pirate hangings were not merely about punishment; they were also about deterrence.
After death, the damned would be hung in iron chains for an unspecified time, a warning to those who would dare wreak havoc and chaos on the commerce of the seas.
The post on which the dead bodies were hung was called a gibbet, hence the island’s chilling name.
When Washington Irving published his great satire of New York history under the pen name Diedrich Knickerbocker in 1809, he included a number of references to Gibbet Island. Mixing real history with myth.
Today, the surname of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the fictional narrator of this and other Irving works, has become a nickname for Manhattan residents in general and was adopted by the New York Knickerbockers.
Like many merchants and New Yorkers, Irving originally opposed the War of 1812, but the British attack on Washington, D.C. in 1814 convinced him to enlist.
He served on the staff of Daniel Tompkins, governor of New York and commander of the New York State Militia.
The war was disastrous for many American merchants, including Irving’s family, and in mid-1815, he left for England to attempt to salvage the family trading company. He remained in Europe for the next 17 years. Irving was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1815.
Irving’s reputation soared, and for the next two years, he led an active social life in Paris and Great Britain, where he was often feted as an anomaly of literature: an upstart American who dared to write English well. He also went “galloping about Italy”.
While in Paris, Irving received a letter from Alexander Hill Everett on January 30, 1826. Everett, recently the American Minister to Spain, urged Irving to join him in Madrid, noting that a number of manuscripts dealing with the Spanish conquest of the Americas had recently been made public.
He left for Madrid and enthusiastically began scouring the Spanish archives for colorful material.Irving had taught himself Spanish when he was younger.
The palace Alhambra in Granada, where Irving briefly resided in 1829, inspired one of his most imaginative books, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.
The book was popular in the United States and in Europe and would have 175 editions published before the end of the century.
It was also the first project of Irving’s to be published with his own name, instead of a pseudonym, on the title page. Irving was invited to stay at the palace of the Duke of Gor, who gave him unfettered access to his library containing many medieval manuscripts. Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada was published a year later, followed by Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus in 1831.
Irving’s writings on Columbus are a mixture of history and fiction, a genre now called romantic history.
Irving based them on extensive research in the Spanish archives, but also added imaginative elements aimed at sharpening the story. The first of these works is the source of the durable myth that medieval Europeans believed the Earth was flat, though the world had known it was not since biblical times.
In 1829, Irving moved into Granada’s ancient palace Alhambra, “determined to linger here”, he said, “until I get some writings under way connected with the place”.
Before he could get any significant writing underway, however, he was notified of his appointment as Secretary to the American Legation in London- they needed someone who had influence and wrote well and at this point, he already was an international star. Worried he would disappoint friends and family if he refused the position, Irving left Spain for England in July 1829.
Arriving in London, Irving joined the staff of American Minister Louis McLane to help negotiate a trade agreement between the United States and the British West Indies.
Following McLane’s recall to the United States in 1831 to serve as Secretary of Treasury, Irving stayed on as the legation’s chargé d’affaires until the arrival of Martin Van Buren, President Andrew Jackson’s nominee for British Minister
While Van Buren was preparing to take over he and Irving lived together and then he resigned his post to concentrate on writing, eventually completing Tales of the Alhambra, which would be published concurrently in the United States and England in 1832.
Irving was still in London when Van Buren received word that the United States Senate had refused to confirm him as the new Minister. Consoling Van Buren, Irving predicted that the Senate’s partisan move would backfire and Van Buren would seem a political martyr, “I should not be surprised”, Irving said, “if this vote of the Senate goes far toward elevating him to the presidential chair”.
Washington Irving arrived in New York, after seventeen years abroad, on May 21, 1832. That September, he accompanied the U.S. Commissioner on Indian Affairs, Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, along with companions Charles La Trobe and Count Albert-Alexandre de Pourtales, on a surveying mission deep in Indian Territory, now known as Oklahoma.
During the party’s visit to St. Louis, which was then little more than a trading post, Irving met William Clark, legendary half of the Lewis & Clark team that explored the lands of the Louisiana Purchase. Clark had recently helped settle the Black Hawk War, named after the Sauk Chief Black Hawk, who was now a prisoner at nearby Jefferson Barracks.
In 1842, after an endorsement from Secretary of State Daniel Webster, President John Tyler appointed Irving as Minister to Spain. Irving was surprised and honored.
While Irving hoped his position as Minister would allow him plenty of time to write, Spain was in a state of perpetual political upheaval during most of his tenure, with a number of warring factions vying for control of the twelve-year-old Queen Isabella II, who began her reign prior to his appointment in 1833.
Irving maintained good relations with the various generals and politicians, as control of Spain rotated through Espartero, Bravo, then Narvaez.
However, the politics and warfare were exhausting, and Irving—homesick and suffering from a crippling skin condition—grew quickly disheartened.
He wrote:
I am wearied and at times heartsick of the wretched politics of this country…The last ten or twelve years of my life, passed among sordid speculators in the United States, and political adventurers in Spain, has shewn me so much of the dark side of human nature, that I begin to have painful doubts of my fellow man; and look back with regret to the confiding period of my literary career, when, poor as a rat, but rich in dreams, I beheld the world through the medium of my imagination and was apt to believe men as good as I wished them to be.
With the political situation in Spain relatively settled, Irving continued to closely monitor the development of the new government and the fate of Isabella.
His official duties as Spanish Minister also involved negotiating American trade interests with Cuba and following the Spanish parliament’s debates over slave trade.
He was also pressed into service by the American Minister to the Court of St. James’s in London, Louis McLane, to assist in negotiating the Anglo-American disagreement over the Oregon border that newly elected president James K. Polk had vowed to resolve.
