Writer Bill Finger on the naming of the city and reasoning for changing Batman's locale from Manhattan to a fictional city: "Originally I was going to call Gotham City 'Civic City'. Then I tried 'Capital City', then 'Coast City'. Then I flipped through the phone book and spotted the name 'Gotham Jewelers' and said, 'That's it', Gotham City. We didn't call it New York because we didn't want anybody in any city to identify with it."[1] "Gotham" had long been a well-known nickname for New York City even prior to Batman's 1939 introduction,[2] which explains why "Gotham Jewelers" and many other businesses in New York City have the word "Gotham" in them. The name Gotham was first popularized as a nickname for New York City in the nineteenth century periodical Salmagundi.
Within the DC Universe, Metropolis is portrayed as one of the largest and wealthiest cities on earth. The co-creator and original artist of Superman, Joe Shuster, modeled the Metropolis skyline after Toronto, where he was born and lived until he was ten.[1] Since then, Metropolis has become a city inspired by Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto, Vancouver, New York City and Los Angeles.Like many of DC's other fictional cities, the location of Metropolis has varied greatly over the years. Metropolis is usually portrayed as a major city in the Midwest, or conversely, on the East Coast, and even the West Coast. Superman co-creator Joe Shuster was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and moved to Cleveland by age ten, where he met co-creator and Ohio native Jerry Siegel. Originally intending to sell the Superman strips to a Cleveland newspaper, they set the stories there as well, and when the strips were re-used for the comic books, they changed the location to Metropolis. (Action Comics #2, however, mistakenly portrays Clark Kent as a reporter for the Cleveland Evening News, although Metropolis's look is based on Toronto, Ontario.)[2] The earliest specific reference to Metropolis located it in New York State: in Superman #2 (Fall 1939), Clark (Superman) Kent sent a telegram to George Taylor, the editor of the Daily Star (the antecedent to the Daily Planet), addressed to "Metropolis, N.Y."[3]