In 1978’s Superman and its sequels, Metropolis is shown as being New York, including depicting such New York landmarks as the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center. Longtime Batman writer and editor Dennis O’Neil said figuratively that Metropolis is New York above 14th Street on a warm spring day, and that Gotham City is New York below 14th Street on a cold, rainy autumn night.

The Fantastic Four have had a number of headquarters, most notably the Baxter Building [enlarge image] (42nd Street and Madison Avenue) in New York City. The Baxter Building was replaced by Four Freedoms Plaza, built at the same location, after the Baxter Building’s destruction.

After the destruction of Four Freedoms Plaza the Fantastic Four moved to a retrofitted warehouse on the New York waterfront which they named Pier 4.

The warehouse was destroyed In the mid-2000s during a battle with Diablo after which the team received a new Baxter Building constructed in Earth’s orbit and teleported into the vacant lot formerly occupied by the original Baxter Building and Four Freedoms Plaza.

The original Spider-Man, created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko for Marvel Comics in 1962, was not, under the costume, an interplanetary exile like Superman or a reclusive millionaire like Batman, but an ordinary, disaffected urban adolescent named Peter Parker. He was raised by his Uncle Ben and Aunt May in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens, New York. He swooped through the skyscraper canyons of New York (not Gotham City or Metropolis), referring to himself as ‘’your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.'’ { NY Times | Photo: Mark Heitoff for Vibe magazine }

Most people know that Batman lives in Gotham City, and that this fictional place is a barely disguised version of New York City – so much so that in real life, NYC is sometimes nicknamed Gotham. Here’s a few lesser known facts about Batman’s home town:

~ The place-name ‘Gotham’ has an interesting pedigree. It was used as early as the 15th century to refer to places with foolish inhabitants – a direct reference to the eponymous town in Nottinghamshire, England.

~ Washington Irving, author of ‘Sleepy Hollow’ fame, used it as a sobriquet for New York for the first time in his satire Salmagundi (1807).

~ Prior to 1941, Batman’s home (in the DC Comics) was New York City; he didn’t move to Gotham until DC Comics #48 (in February 1941).

~ Gotham is modeled after NYC in architecture and atmosphere – although the dark, brooding aspects of New York are emphasized and exaggerated. It is said to resemble “Manhattan below 14th Street at 11 minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November”, although in the comics, Gotham and NYC do exist separately from each other.

~ Being a fictional place, written about by a plethora of different writers, it’s perhaps inevitable that there’s confusion about its precise location (and subdivision). The city has been situated at the shores of ‘Lake Gotham’ but is more usually placed somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard of the US – in varying degrees of proximity to Metropolis, Superman’s home town.

~ Several actual maps of Gotham exist, some based on Manhattan, Vancouver or the Rhode Island shoreline. This map of Gotham City [enlarge] was produced by Eliot R. Brown for Gotham City Secret File and Origins #1. It’s considered quite ‘definitive’, and is taken from the No Man’s Land story arc.

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READ MORE >> new york, celebs | February 18th, 2007