Why NYC is Called Gotham

public domain

When many people hear the name “Gotham”, they’re reminded of the Batman comics and movies. When I hear it, I think only of New York City, often wondering how it got that nickname. As it turns out, author and NYC native Washington Irving, of Icabod Crane fame, made the association over 120 years ago. 

Irving published a satirical periodical, Salmagundi, in which he wrote articles that poked fun at and lampooned the city and its more eccentric residents. He learned of a medieval English village called Gotham, meaning “goat town”, whose inhabitants conspired to keep a king from bringing chaos and higher taxes to the home they loved. An ancient folk tale called The Wise Men of Gotham likely served as Irving’s inspiration. While Batman’s Gotham is a dark, dangerous, and brooding place, Irving’s couldn’t have been more different.

The legend relates how, when King John planned to build a hunting lodge in their woods, Gotham’s residents greeted a planning visit from the king’s knights by feigning madness. They took turns doing things like trying to drown an eel in their pond and fencing in a bush to prevent a cuckoo from escaping. A man was seen carrying 2 bushels of grain on his back while leading his horse, telling everyone that the bushels were too heavy for the horse to carry. Madness being considered highly contagious, the knights soon left to advise the king to look elsewhere for a building site.

In 1907, Washington Irving adopted the name Gotham for NYC. New Yorkers embraced it, and it stuck. As for Gotham, which was originally pronounced Goat-um, that town has a Cuckoo Bush inn, Cuckoo Bush Mound, and a weathervane with a Batman figure on it.

Modern Lit: In Five Years, by Rebecca Serle

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In Five Years, a novel by Rebecca Serle, is more than a story. Reading it is an experience, with genuine emotional highs and lows. Protagonist Danielle Kohan is a 30-something woman who is the very definition of the type A personality. A corporate attorney living in NYC, Dannie is about to land her dream job and become engaged to long term boyfriend David, and life is going exactly according to plan, thank you very much. In five years, they will be married, living in Gramercy Park, and living large. Returning home from their celebratory dinner and awash in champagne, Dannie falls asleep. In her dreams, she finds herself exactly five years in the future, in a loft apartment not her own, wearing a different engagement ring, in the company of Aaron, a movie star handsome man she’s never met before. The calendar on the wall tells her it’s exactly five years in the future. When she awakens back in her own time and place, Dannie is shaken to her core, unsure about whether she’s had a dream or a vision. What if what she experienced is real?

Up until this point, early in the plot, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to continue reading what seemed to be a rom-com, but now I was hooked. Dannie attempts to follow her carefully constructed life plan, but she isn’t very good and dealing with uncertainty, and soon there will be other changes that will submerge her into depths of hope and fear, anguish and despair, confusion and anger and depression. Serle is a very good writer, but the center of the novel contained too many emotional elements that I simply prefer not to deal with anymore when reading fiction. But that’s my preference; many other readers, judging from their reviews, don’t feel that way. At the final third of the novel, Dannie’s dream comes back into play in a very interesting way, so the plot was redeemed, and I was glad to discover how Dannie would fare, even though I came to not like her very much. I didn’t enjoy the subject matter, but I can appreciate the skill with which this author can put together a story.




View all my reviews

Modern Lit: East Coast Girls, by Kerry Kletter

East Coast Girls by Kerry Kletter

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Four high school girls, intelligent, pretty, and vivacious, share a series of idyllic summers on the beaches of Long Island. All of them have less than ideal home lives, and their deep friendship helps to fill that void. Their final vacation together after graduating is bittersweet, separation looming as they prepare to set forth as individuals into life’s next phase. Driving home on their last day, they vow to remain close and visit often, when the unthinkable happens. East Coast Girls is the story of how each copes with a future quite different than what was confidently expected.  Now, at age 30, they meet at the beach one last time, but not without trepidation.

For the reader, what happened on that tragic night is a mystery, clarified slowly and haltingly, until the book ends. None of the women, for that matter, know the whole truth about what actually took place. This is what motivated me to keep reading, because much of the tale, related by each of characters in turn, seemed like a coming of age novel.  Having outgrown the support system they had created, and in the absence of any other, their confidence has dwindled in the face of the daunting difficulties that life pitches at them.

The summer reunion is beautifully developed. It is in this sequence that the characters are their most authentic. It reminded me of the movie The Breakfast Club, which in essence was a successful group therapy session. As in the film, these struggling, damaged women somehow find the nerve to speak painful truths to one another, and can come to understand and accept those truths because they are told by people they once trusted and can come to trust again. During this process, the reader ultimately learns about the traumatic experience that once had the power to divide them, and now has the power to unite.

Difficult material. Well done, Kerry Kletter!

View all my reviews

Modern Lit: The Wife Between Us, by Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Blurbs. You gotta love ‘em. Or not. In the case of The Wife Between Us, most of its blurbs appear to have been dashed off by other writers based upon limited knowledge of what’s actually going on in this book. Famous novelists are constantly hit up for this sort of thing; must be a pain. Anyhow, The Wife Between Us is a generic novel piggy-backing on the success of the original blockbuster, Gone Girl. Perhaps had I read Wife before Gone, I’d have experienced it differently. Probably not, though, because while the publicity promises “fiendish” thrills, twists, and chills,the narrative generates very little suspense. Curiosity, yes, confusion, yes, twists, yes, but suspense, nada.

On the positive side, the prose is competent and the plot, though not original, and is repetitive in many places, is cohesive. The female characters are relatable, and Richard’s behavior as a narcissist and a bully with a serious personality disorder is spot on, though Vanessa’s friends, and indeed, the reader notice that he has some serious issues long before either his ex or his fiancée. Emma shows more backbone than Vanessa/Nellie does, until the very end, but I didn’t really care for either of them, weak and manipulative as they are in their own right. The Vanessa/Nellie meme fails as a literary device; many reviewers, even some pros, think the fiancée’s name is Nellie, not Emma. (Richard calls Vanessa his “sweet Nellie”, a nickname she abhors yet never asks him to stop.)

All in all, The Wife Between Us cogently depicts a mental illness, a marriage in ruins, and a wife nearly destroyed by it, but it’s no thriller. I’d like to read Hendricks and Pekkanen in some other, less overworked genre.

View all my reviews

It’s a Mystery: The Widow’s House, by Carol Goodman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Books about books are always fun to read, and this one features three different writers, each working on their own novels. Thirty-something couple Clare and Jess leave behind their trendy loft in Brooklyn to relocate to the Hudson River Valley. Though Jess published a respectable debut novel, ten years later he hasn’t managed to complete a second. Clare would like to get back into writing, and they’re counting on this move to revitalize them professionally and as a couple. They find themselves taking on residence as caretakers at the River Road estate of a famed author who taught some classes while they were in college. It’s a happy reunion, and for a short while things go well, but from the get-go, Clare, who has always been sensitive to the paranormal, begins seeing apparitions of one of the mansion’s previous employees. Her husband encourages Clare to channel her experiences into a novel, telling her to use her imagination or her imagination will use her.

All of the Goodman books that I’ve read and enjoyed involve women academics, writing, water, and the paranormal, but no two have been alike. The Widow’s House is an amalgam of the gothic, the mystery, and the supernatural, and the story depends equally upon each of those elements. The weather and the river mists add to the ambience of the bucolic setting, as do the local history and folklore that are so prevalent in the region to this day (where the Headless Horseman and Rip van Winkle got started!) The tension builds incrementally as strange things keep occurring, and grows so strong that Clare doesn’t know whom to trust or what to believe. The same can been said for the reader, at least those who enjoy a well crafted ghost story.

View all my reviews

Modern Lit: The Museum of Extraordinary Things, by Alice Hoffman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Alice Hoffman works her magic again in The Museum of Extraordinary Things, a tale about a place that, in its time, would ordinarily be referred to as a freak show. The museum is located near Coney Island’s Dreamland. Among its extraordinary performers is the owner’s daughter, Coralie, who was born with webbed fingers, and therefore, to his way of thinking, will make a perfect mermaid. Night after night, she immerses herself in her tank to entertain audiences  that range from ordinary folk to out and out perverts. Her autocratic, rather demoniacal father also forces Coralie to take nightly swims in the Hudson, to foster stories about a mysterious river creature.

Coralie narrates her own role in this tale, sharing the protagonist role with Eddie, a young Jewish emigre who is estranged from his father, a garment worker in New York’s sweatshops. Eddie rejects this life to become a photographer, quite a gifted one, and he narrates his own side of the story, working among the lower classes in such settings as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. He also develops a reputation for being exceedingly good at locating missing persons. Eddie and Coralie’s paths of course with cross, and the second half of the book chronicles the  halting development of their relationship.

This is a book replete with vivid period detail. Hoffman includes among her characters some real-life figures as she depicts the terrible hardships of life among the underclasses at the beginning of the twentieth century, and one of the joys of reading her is that she never has to lapse into preaching to make her point clear. Though it is ultimately a love story, even its denouement is far from light and airy; this is the sort of tale that will stay with you long after you’ve returned the book to its shelf.

View all my reviews

It’s a Mystery: Surrender, New York, by Caleb Carr

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Disgraced criminologist Dr. Trajan Jones, formerly of the NYPD, has set up shop with his business partner/friend, Dr. Mike Li, in the village of Surrender in upstate New York, where the duo teaches online forensic science courses and takes on private cases for investigation. Trajan bases his methods on those of Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, protagonist of author Carr’s fine breakout novels, The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness. Having lost a leg to cancer in his youth, Jones has psychological issues of his own and must deal with constant pain and the possibility of relapse. As a character, he shares much in common with Sherlock Holmes, including the annoying traits of arrogance and irascibility. As the novel’s narrator, Trajan is also prone digressing into lengthy lectures about science, literature, and human foibles. Mike Li, on the other hand, is relatively free of heavy baggage, and is much more genuine colleague than Dr. Watson ever was, though he does offer a sense of humor and steady emotional support and when needed.

The complex plot is replete with other colorful characters, most notably the irrepressible, teenaged “consulting detective Lucas, and Marcianna, the beloved cheetah that Trajan rescued from an abusive petting zoo. Both provide relief from the intensity of Trajan and Mike’s current case, which involves the deaths of a series of “throwaway children”, homeless kids left behind when their parents simply deserted them. It soon becomes clear that the Empire State’s senior politicos understand the depth of this problem but simply don’t care, preferring to cover it up. Trajan and Mike determine to rectify this situation no matter whom they must take down and how much resistance they encounter.

Plot, setting, and characters blend well together, but at times not well enough to overcome the novel’s shortcomings. One is its heavy use of profanity, especially the f word, which peppers every chapter regardless of who is talking. Trajan is also overly fond of the word “indeed” and the use of convoluted sentences when simpler and shorter ones would do just as well. Finally, the book is just too long, and the many suspenseful and/or gruesome scenes are interspersed with passages overloaded with detail.

Biography: Insubordinate Spirit, by Missy Wolfe

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The title of this study is a bit misleading. Yes, there is information on the life of Elizabeth Fones Winthrop Feake Hallett, but there is much more info on the 17th century Puritan experience in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York (Amsterdam). With respect to Elizabeth, there is a dearth of evidence about her day to day existence, and Missy Wolfe has unearthed a bit more with a few interesting personal letters and diaries written by “Bess” and her family, especially her eldest daughter. Especially elucidating are their exchanges with John Winthrop, Jr. who, as Ms. Wolfe described him, was a true “renaissance man”, scientist, medical specialist, political innovator, and man of reason. There are sections on the founding and development of Greenwich and Stamford, which came about only following lengthy wrangling between the English and Dutch over the borderlands between their respective colonies. In and amongst these sections, Wolfe manages to establish Elizabeth as an independent thinker who had the courage to resist conformity regardless of the personal hardships that the Puritan government visited upon her as a result.

Missy Wolfe is an amateur historian, and as such, she sometimes uses anachronistic language and repeats timeworn myths. Elizabeth, for example, didn’t “date”, and colonial women did not turn into torches because their home fires ignited their clothing as they worked over the flames. Still, there are things to be gleaned from this narrative, particularly in the many details about the Native Americans living in the Greenwich area during Elizabeth’s time there; Ms. Wolfe also provides information about some of the names in the town of today that are directly related to them. Pinpointing the location of her last dwelling site, on a promontory that stood above Hell Gate, is interesting as well. The author also fleshes out the personality of John Underhill, infamous for his part in the Pequot massacre. At the end of the book, she reports what is known about the lives of the descendants of the key figures in her narrative.

View all my reviews

Constitution Island, West Point, NY

The staff of the Webb Deane Stevens museum in Wethersfield, CT, gathered together a while back for a rare, and most enjoyable, field trip to the scenic Hudson River Valley, a region of outstanding natural beauty and historic significance. Our first stop was Constitution Island, located on the river within view of West Point and part of the military academy itself. The Island is most famous for the Great Chain that was placed across the Hudson during the Revolutionary War, to prevent British ships from navigating this strategically vital stretch of the river. No military action was to take place on the fortified island, which was the first fort built by the newly-declared independent Americans. Interestingly, it was named “Constitution” to remind the British that America was due the same rights as England under the English constitution. The US Constitution had yet to be written. The 230-year-old house that stands on the island today began as military barracks. In 1836, it became the residence of the Warner family. Susan and Anna Warner were well-known authors in the nineteenth century, producing over 100 books between them. Susan wrote The Wide, Wide World in 1850 which became a best seller of its day. Anna is best known for writing the words to the hymn Jesus Loves Me. The sisters taught Bible classes to West Point cadets for forty years, entertaining such well-known soldiers as Dwight D. Eisenhower and Omar Bradley. The house was enlarged by the Warners, and contains a large collection of their furnishings and other belongings, including albums full of photos of handsome young cadets. Now a museum, it is maintained as closely as possible to its appearance at the time of the death in 1915 of Anna. A slide album of highlights is presented below.

Following our visit, we were treated to an elegant catered lunch and a cruise on the beautiful Hudson River upon the personal yacht of the Superintendent of West Point Military Academy. Then, back on the van for the short drive to Boscobel, which is discussed in the following post:

Modern Lit: Rooms, by Lauren Oliver

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Already well known as a successful writer of young adult novels, Lauren Oliver ventures into the adult market with  Rooms.  Long estranged from their wealthy husband/ father, the Walkers return to their former home in upstate New York for his funeral. Each of them has brought a parcel of personal struggles along with their baggage, and in the days before the service, long buried memories bubble up to the surface, compounding their distress. Only one of the family, teenaged son Trenton, realizes that they are not alone in the house; two of the former residents, now long dead, have failed to move on.

The stories and circumstances of each of the six main characters are told from their own points of view in a series of alternating vignettes. These play out within a specific room in the house, which accounts for the book’s title. These people are all interesting in his/her own right, and each is emotionally distanced from the others, locked in their own misery. Each is preoccupied with thoughts of their own deaths, and not merely because of the funeral. Their depression is palpable, and it’s easy to see why the ghosts have yet to move on. For me, the most compelling characters are Trenton,  and the shades of Alice and Sandra, who were each in early middle age when they died.  Yes, their capacity for denial and repression is strong, but these three have cracks in their armor into which slices of honesty keep filtering. Perhaps that is why Trenton senses, hears, and sees faint manifestations of the spirits, especially when they comment  between themselves (sometimes humorously) about the Walkers.

One of the most popular songs of 2014 is Let It Go, from Disney’s Frozen.  One of the recurring tropes in Rooms is the phrase, “You’ve got to learn to let go.” This is a lesson that everyone absorbs during the last quarter of the book, in greater or lesser degrees, as they are forced by a series of unexpected shocks that turn what they thought they knew upside down,   to confront the truths that are holding them in misery. Yes, there is reason to hope, even though none of us can entirely know another.