Where in the World is Gotham City?

Unlike Marvel, whose entire universe is either in space or somewhere in New York, DC creates fictional cities that stand in for their real life counterparts. They don’t necessarily replace their inspiring cities, just give writers a fresh canvas on which to paint that seems familiar to readers. For instance, in The Flash the action takes place between two cities, Central City and Keystone City. The two towns are sister cities, connected by a bridge. The prevailing theory is that they are fictional stand-ins for Kansas City, MO, and Kansas City, KS. That’s not to say that the KCs don’t exist in the DCU, they just have similar profiles to Central and Keystone.

Sometimes these alternate cities change the gestalt of real places. For instance, New York isn’t The Big Apple in DC. Because it’s geographically located between Metropolis and Gotham, it’s been called The Cinderella City, much different than its center-of-the-universe importance in Marvel.

But how does one know for sure where these places are? There have been many versions of these locations over the years, but DC has always been the publisher who values continuity. You know they had to have released a map or atlas at some point. Good news is…they have! In 1990, DC released The Atlas of the DC Universe! Take a look:

DC published this AND provided a map for Mayfair Games’s DC Heroes RPG. In most incarnations, Gotham is located in New Jersey, though it’s been likened to everything from Chicago to New York to Baltimore. Hell, Christopher Nolan modeled it after Singapore. Bill Finger and Bob Kane implied that Gotham was actually New York, even before they had coined the name Gotham, since they were both native New Yorkers. The real problem with this is the fact that Metropolis is also a fictionalized version of The Big Apple. While they both perhaps represented two sides of the same coin, the heroes that inhabited them created an identity that couldn’t really be considered New York.

The Nolan era films intentionally kept Gotham’s location vague, even going so far as crafting the police license plates to say ‘Gotham’ instead of the state it’s in, and Batman v Superman is doing the same by implying Metropolis is its own principality like Washington D.C..

Any official word from the DC brass has been spotty at best, so these older publications are the most modern indicators we have. During the Batman story arc No Man’s Land, a mapmaker was hired to detail an exact look at Gotham which is considered official canon to this day.

So, essentially, we can show you exactly on what street in Gotham the Wayne’s were killed, but not in what state the whole damn city rests. Based on everything I’ve found in my research, though, a safe bet is in New Jersey, south of both Metropolis and New York. It also indicates that, just like Batman and Superman, Gotham and Metropolis are the two personalities of New York City. Metropolis being the bright, hopeful, glittering beacon on the hill. Gotham being the darker, grounded, chaotic swell of humanity New York is also known to be. In that way, Gotham is in New York, just like it is in any major massive, older city with a real American spirit. Gotham is in Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore and New York or any place that people love and struggle to make better. At the end of the day, that’s all we really need to know.

For interactive maps of the DCU, old or newer, check out some of these resources and judge for yourself:

https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=212183360251183830613.00048343d238ad0841c35&dg=feature

http://www.karridian.net/dcatlas.html