It Looked Familiar: Historical

This series has focussed on relating images of New York (with the occasional foray elsewhere) in comic books to actual images of the city. But sometimes the allusions are in narrative…Batman ponders the history of Gotham City: Some actual history: the second (of the three total) Great Fire of New York began at night in December 1835. At that time, the city’s population was around 250,000; given that the population in 1790 was 33,000, it’s a fair bet that it was 25,000 or less in the 1830s. As my professors used to say, it’s within an engineering approximation.