Why is New York called “Gotham”?
“Gotham” was first used in reference to Manhattan by Washington Irving in the early 19th century. The word itself is English in origin and dates from the Middle Ages. Gotham, or “Gotam”, was the name of a real and often-ridiculed town in England, whose residents had a reputation for madness. A variant on this story was that Gothamites were not truly mad but simply “wise enough to play the fool” — in a variety of ways they merely acted silly to gain their ends. “It was doubtless this more beguiling-if tricksterish-sense of Gotham that Manhattanistes assumed as an acceptable nickname,” writes Mike Wallace in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.
