Washington Irving Is Born, and Later Names the City Gotham

Washington Irving was born on April 3, 1783, at 131 William Street in Manhattan, the same week New Yorkers got word that the Treaty of Paris had ended the Revolutionary War. His mother named him after George Washington, and six years later the general himself blessed the boy on a New York street just before his own inauguration as president. Irving grew up to write "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," but decades earlier, as a young satirist running a magazine called Salmagundi with his brother and James Kirke Paulding, he stuck the city with a joke that outlived the joke. In the magazine's 17th issue, dated November 11, 1807, he called New York "Gotham," an old Anglo-Saxon word for "Goat's Town," mocking the city's self-regard by comparing it to a village of fools. Two centuries later the nickname is on lunch boxes and comic books, and most people who say it have no idea it started as an insult.