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Neighbourhoods
Mar. 19th, 2009 08:49 pmSome of you will remember the Daily Planet Guide to Gotham from...a decade ago next year, already?
Amazing how time flies, no matter what you're doing.
Anyway. The first couple of chapters were taken up with Gotham's history and layout as best I could untangle and retangle it from the works published to that point. Eliot Brown's map for No Man's Land # 1 was among the greatest forms of help on that front, putting Gotham over the goal line in making that city truly its own place on the DCU-American landscape. Of course, I tried to fit in everything I could that didn't show up on that map, stuff that had been mentioned over the decades prior to that point, both in Gotham herself and on the mainland in Gotham County.
Turns out there's more to the landscape than I ever knew, which I thank Bob Greenberger's Definitive Batman Encyclopedia for. One more reason I'd dearly love to take a crack at revising the Gotham travel guide, that was. And definitely a fun read.
I've gotten another recent kick in the pants about that project from another quarter: the Toronto Star
.
Turns out they've started up a new blog and a Google Maps hack to go with it, devoted to tracking Torontonians' perceptions of their city's assorted neighbourhoods.
In a recent edition of that paper, about a week or so ago they counted off 173 known neighbourhoods.
A week later, they reached the conclusion that 173 was a little on the conservative side. So they added about fifteen more and fiddled with the boundaries of the ones they already knew a little bit here and there.
As I recall, Toronto as we know it now, post-European settlement specifically, is about 200 years old. Gotham's twice that age and it's stumbled over the centuries into trying to cram the contents of New York's five boroughs into a collection of islands maybe twice or three times the size of Manhattan.
One more reason why that town's so messed up.
Amazing how time flies, no matter what you're doing.
Anyway. The first couple of chapters were taken up with Gotham's history and layout as best I could untangle and retangle it from the works published to that point. Eliot Brown's map for No Man's Land # 1 was among the greatest forms of help on that front, putting Gotham over the goal line in making that city truly its own place on the DCU-American landscape. Of course, I tried to fit in everything I could that didn't show up on that map, stuff that had been mentioned over the decades prior to that point, both in Gotham herself and on the mainland in Gotham County.
Turns out there's more to the landscape than I ever knew, which I thank Bob Greenberger's Definitive Batman Encyclopedia for. One more reason I'd dearly love to take a crack at revising the Gotham travel guide, that was. And definitely a fun read.
I've gotten another recent kick in the pants about that project from another quarter: the Toronto Star
.
Turns out they've started up a new blog and a Google Maps hack to go with it, devoted to tracking Torontonians' perceptions of their city's assorted neighbourhoods.
In a recent edition of that paper, about a week or so ago they counted off 173 known neighbourhoods.
A week later, they reached the conclusion that 173 was a little on the conservative side. So they added about fifteen more and fiddled with the boundaries of the ones they already knew a little bit here and there.
As I recall, Toronto as we know it now, post-European settlement specifically, is about 200 years old. Gotham's twice that age and it's stumbled over the centuries into trying to cram the contents of New York's five boroughs into a collection of islands maybe twice or three times the size of Manhattan.
One more reason why that town's so messed up.