HISTORY OF CAPE CITY
By Perry P. Parsons, Editor-in-Chief Daily Navigator
The original town was named for 1620 Dutch captain named
Cornelius Jacobsen Mey who explored and charted the area between 1611–1614, and established a claim for the province of New Netherland. It was later settled by New Englanders from the New Haven Colony. What is now the city of Cape May was originally formed as the borough of Cape Island by an Act of the New Jersey Legislature on March 8, 1848, from portions of Lower Township. It was reincorporated as Cape Island city on March 10, 1851, then it became Cape May City as of March 9, 1869, and shortly after World War I, it was expanded to its present borders in 1918. Over 90% of Cape May County is now part of "Cape City."
The process of the city Cape May's annexation of it's surrounding settlements actually began in 1916, during World War I. A lot of details would be ironed out over the next two decades: the creation of assorted "filler" neighborhoods between formerly independent cities, assorted labor disputes, social unrest, and the imposition of Prohibition.
That last act led to the other "great consolidation" in Cape City of the period: the unification of organized crime families, and the
mafia in particular, then coming into prominence in the city's underworld.
Durante Bianchi allied his family with the
Prosecco and
Cortesse organizations in 1920 in order to use Prohibition to cement a stranglehold on Cape City's "underground" economy. In opposition to Bianchi's three-family alliance were the
Neri and the
Sangiovese. This ongoing battle went hot and cold over the next decade and was not to be decided until the mid 1930s.
Then there was the Crash of 1929 to deal with. The growth of numerous independent small towns into a modern metropolis would have faltered and likely failed if not for the arrival of the automobile.
The
Cartwright Family had always been prominent in the region, since settling there in the mid 1700s. By the early 20th Century the family industry had grown from a simple boatwright's shack alongside the harbor into a large and diverse industrial concern.
Calvin Cartwright managed to diversify the family holdings, growing the real estate empire into Cartwright Shipping's rail transportation operation. This triggered the creation of Cape Railworks and the building of Kirby Central Terminal. Since Cape May was still early in its design and layout phase, for the most part, Calvin Cartwright was able to ensure the metropolis was designed to accommodate the motorcar, avoiding many of the transitional problems that would plague New York City or Chicago. Calvin Cartwright also brokered important overseas shipping contracts with Henry Ford, giving him almost exclusive rights to move Ford's new automobiles to Europe. By the time of his death at age 63, Calvin Cartwright handed off one of the few rising stars of American commerce to his son,
Kenneth Cartwright, Sr.
Meanwhile, other power struggles loomed for Cape City, America, and the world.
THE GOLDEN AGE: The Greatest Generation
The Second World War finally ended the Depression, in Cape City as elsewhere. While the nations of Earth took up arms, Cape City geared up in a spectacular fashion.
In industry, the Cartwrights, as usual, led the way forward in its transition to a war footing. Led by Kenneth Cartwright, Sr., aided by his son of
Kenneth Cartwright Jr., the Cartwrights had begun transitioning their shipbuilding operations to meet navy needs, their textile industries into creating canvas, and even their small pharmaceuticals laboratory had begun to stockpile battlefield basics instead of pursuing research and development, several months before Washington DC announced the lend lease program. "Junior Cartwright" had also begun championing responsible industrialism nearly fifty years before modern terms such as "green funds" or "ethical investment" would come into vogue. Cartwright Industries' aviation, textile, chemical, and shipbuilding operations were becoming vital parts of American defense.
In 1940, amongst the slums and docks along Delaware Bay, the silver and blue armored hero known as the invincible
Industrialist served as an inspiration to countless young boys, many of who were orphans. Jubilant to have a hero, Cape City welcomed Industrialist with open arms — exactly the kind of treatment he didn't want. According to the only interview he ever gave, with a young
Daily Navigator cub reporter
Perry P. Parsons, the Industrialist only wanted to keep the streets as safe as he could and avoid any kind of glory or attention.
The year 1935 had seen the debut of the heroine
Astarte, but by 1941 It was clear that whomever she was behind her mask, she made her home in Cape City. Today we know that this Astarte was the first publicly recognized heroine of several "light bringers" who would hail from Earth in the Twentieth Century. She was a co-founder of the first incarnation of the
Liberty Alliance of America.
The first Astarte was widely considered to be one of the lynchpins of the Liberty Alliance, and perceived, quite rightly, as one of its great powerhouses. Her efforts helped keep Cape City safe from everything from Bundist Fifth-Columnists and Nazi raids to super criminals such as
Eclipser and
Chlorofoe.
Astarte also played a role as one of the senior members of the
Liberty Alliance Worldwide, an organization that came to serve as an umbrella group of all the Allied Nations' "mystery men" during the War. Although most of the action was confined to the European Theatre, the Liberty Alliance Worldwide fought at least four major battles against various adversaries in the vicinity of Delaware Bay. Most famously, in 1942,
Captain Übermensch led a battalion of soldiers into the city in an attempt to kidnap the visiting Alan Turning — only to be thwarted by Astarte,
Tower of London, and the Industrialist. In 1943,
Wülfpack and his
Super U-Boat sought to mine Delaware Bay, a counter assault led by
Ultra-Marine and his sister
Aqua-Marine, destroyed the submarine and the "North Atlantic Butcher" spent the remainder of the war an Allied POW. Several minor skirmishes between heroes and adversaries were fought in the area, all of them ending, thankfully, in victories for the Liberty Alliance.
THE SILVER AGE: A Generation Lost
Following World War II, Cape City saw growth like never before. A solid economy, coupled with the euphoria of the war being over, pushed nearly every citizen of Cape City towards more: greater strides in science were made, greater social reforms took place, and Cape City finally received the respect of New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and it's other contemporaries. But this brief boom is now remembered as the last days of the Golden Age.
Today several events from postwar era can unfortunately be seen as a harbinger of the darker times ahead. The best known of these being the Romeo Riots of 1945, triggered by returning American troops resentful of recent Italian American immigrants who had refused to serve. The resentments fostered by police and city officials as a result, first, of looking the other way during the riots and, later, conducting mass arrests of Italian American victims of those attacks would taint the relationship between the people and their government for decades. The fire of 1957 that nearly destroyed all of Clarkston, the origins of which remain unknown, was another black mark on the era. Sadder still, was the loss of our heroes. There were no recorded sightings of the Industrialist after V-J Day, Tower of London and the other European mystery men returned to their homes after the war, Ultra-Marine and Aqua-Marine returned to Atlantis for good in 1946, and finally Astarte left Earth to permanently return to space in 1951.
As bad as these blows to the city's morale might have been, it was only aggravated when the economy began to falter. For the first time in its history, Cape City was plagued by massive unemployment in the wake of the war, thanks both to demilitarization and the death of "Junior Cartwright" leaving the city's largest employer rudderless.
Also troubling was that the old criminal empires of Cape City once again opened for business. The Bianchi and Neri mobs had gained an unhealthy amount of "public goodwill" due to the police mishandling of the Romeo Riots and by their wartime focus on "helping" people around the most restrictive of wartime rationing via the Black Market. In the post war years they gained considerable high-tech expertise because of all the scientific talent from Europe finding new homes in North America. This was evidenced by the increase of so-called "science criminals," such as Dr. Oliva A. Keller, the second
Chlorofoe.
Not even the 1947 debut of the
Golem could reverse the decay settling in. The founding of the mafia's
Cape Commission occurred in 1949. This was designed to mediate disputes between what now numbered seven mod families within the greater Cape May County. The Cape Commission would, however, be answerable to
La Commissione in New York City, just as were the other mafia networks in America. (Although rumors persist that the mafia's anti-superhero expertise — the so called
Cape Killers — is firmly controlled by the Cape City families.)
Not even the decade long revival of the "mystery man" in the person of new heroes like
Vesper and
Sundown, seemed to make a real dent in the corruption. That revival ended in a bloody tragedy when Sundown was murdered in his own Wayne Heights home by Jonathan Smith, the
Eclipser. This was the first of a series of murders targeting Sundown and his team of young heroes —
The Liberty Club — in their civilian identities. Eclipser blamed Sundown and his team mates for the "corruption" of his daughter, as Vesper had betrayed him to the authorities during the war. Eclipser would go on to murder five of the seven members of the Liberty Club, with only Golem and Vesper escaping the massacre dubbed the
Twilight of the Superheroes.
Another part of the problem, some historians theorize, was the role of the late Junior Cartwright's son,
Christopher Cartwright, in the family empire. Despite family tradition, he simply wasn't interested in the "business of business" as his forefathers had been. He preferred to spend his days in charitable medical relief work in the Caribbean islands, helping wherever he could.
The communist overthrow of the Cuban government, however, cut the young man's charitable crusade short. The lone survivor of a guerrilla attack on a rural missionary hospital, Cartwright was ransomed back by the communists for an undisclosed sum paid by the Cartwright Technology board of directors.
Upon his return, Christopher threw himself into medical studies with a vengeance. Graduating from Banner University Medical School with honors. He also through himself into the family business and social scene with the same dedication. As a result, he not only advanced the family's fortunes and proved a highly component surgeon... But gained a wife as well in
Catherine "Kitty" Capshaw, the daughter of another prominent industrialist family, based in New Jordan. Their marriage produced a son,
Clark Cartwright, whom everyone expected to continue the family pattern.
It was not to be. One July night shortly after Clark's ninth birthday, the Cartwright's went into Wayne Heights to catch a movie, Fritz Lang's
Metropolis, at the Sovereign Theatre, then as now devoted to the classics. Upon its conclusion, the Cartwright's decided to walk to their car rather than calling for their chauffeur. By all accounts, Christopher had argued against it, but gave in to the wishes of his wife and son.
A thief accosted them, demanding their money and jewelry. In the process of taking the jewelry from Kitty Cartwright, he shot and killed her. Turning the gun on Christopher Cartwright, his shot went wide and killed young Clark. The sole survivor, Christopher Cartwright retreated from public view, becoming one of the most notorious and eccentric people in Cape City society.
Already in a downward slope after the murder of Sundown, the Cartwright shooting pushed Wayne Heights off the cliff, falling into absolute disrepute, earning the nickname "Pain Hill." The long standing saying about the neighborhood since the Cartwright murder is that "hope doesn't live long on Pain Hill." Still, there are those who try to prove the saying wrong — with some success.
Eventually, things would begin to change for Cape City. As during the Second World War, the reasons for the good tidings would come from the skies and wear a cape.
THE BRONZE AGE: A New Generation
Everyone remembers where they were when they first heard the name
Exemplar and saw the picture of the Samaritan of Steel leaping fourteen stories out of the crowd to effortlessly — and gently — catch the falling infant,
Jennifer Holmes, as she fell from the burning Blake Tower. It was, perhaps, one of the most remarkable events in human history.
The city went Exemplar-crazy after that, with his picture (or at least his silhouette against the skyline) appearing on the front page of every East Coast newspaper for nearly a month. When the ground breaking first interview with Exemplar was published in the
Daily Navigator (the professional journalism debut of reporter Clara Kennedy), the city came alive with joy, welcoming the new hero. Shown in the interview to be a kind, gentle man, with tremendous power and unshakable morals, the city realized that it had a new hero. Exemplar is said to have ushered in a new age of heroes, unmatched since the heady days of the Liberty Alliance.
Exemplar's arrival in Cape City apparently wasn't a source of awe and wonder for everyone. As one of his first acts as a Special Deputy of the Cape May County Sheriff's Department, Exemplar arrested Christopher Cartwright for public endangerment and aiding and abetting known felons. All charges against the industrial magnate were later dropped, but according to some, laid the groundwork for a power struggle between the two for control of Cape City.
Under Exemplar's protection, Cape City continued to thrive and prosper, with life in the city becoming more exciting with the added presence of the People's Paragon.
Life in Cape City continued on as it had for forty years, with mergers, acquisitions, and new ideas responsible for the ever changing skyline. After Exemplar made Cape City his home, the city's population surged by nearly twenty percent in only two years, attributed by many as being a case of "Exemplar Fever." Exemplar's naysayers, however, point to the explosive reemergence of Cartwright Technology at this time leading to the city's low joblessness rate and swelling tax rolls.
While Christopher Cartwright and his family's corporation continues to pump the financial lifeblood into the city, Christopher's time as the city's favorite son was clearly over. His reputation darkened by his eccentricity after his family's death and the cloud over him after his arrest by Exemplar, when he finally succumbed to pancreatic cancer the story didn't even make the front pages of even Cape City's local newspapers. But the saga of the Cartwrights wouldn't end with him.
Alexander Albright, in his youth, is said to have combined the best qualities of Nikolai Tesla and John D. Rockefeller, with the charisma — and stunning good looks — of a young Cary Grant. Although not as world-famous as the first appearance of Exemplar, almost anyone of a certain age living in Cape City can tell you about the day they spent gathered around their television sets to watch the 22-year old from West Allen complete his round-the-world, nonstop flight in the experimental solar-powered XA-01, an experimental plane of his own design. What no one knew at the time —including Alexander himself — was that he was a distant cousin of Christopher Cartwright. Thus, he was the sole inheritor of the Cartwright fortune, estates, and controlling shares of the family company. At only twenty-three years of age, the charismatic young inventor was instantly one of the richest men in the world.
With this overnight financial security, Albright made headlines when he addressed Cape City from the steps of City Hall, swearing that he would never allow his company to spend a single cent outside the city's borders unless matched by a dollar spent in the city. This announcement was just what the ailing city needed. With the prospects of high-tech jobs, enrollment in all of Cape City's colleges and universities skyrocketed, and smaller businesses were once again attracted to the city, eager to be a part of Albright's success. Or hoping, like
Lantern Labs, to attract skilled high-tech workers to their own facilities.
Albright bought companies at a feverish lace, revitalizing most of them for the better. Before he was 30, Albright owned diversified holdings in media communications (
AllCom), banking (
AllFine and
AllCredit), petroleum (
AllFuels), research (
AllBot and
Advanced Life Laboratories), and of course the extensive Cartwright holdings in transportation and manufacturing.
Making good on his promise to keep his money in Cape City, Albright became the city's leading philanthropist, founding an astonishing fifty-two different scholarship programs as well as building ten libraries in some of the cities poorest neighborhoods. There was rarely a week when Albright's picture wasn't on the front page of the Daily Navigator, opening a new school, announcing a new foundation, or awarding a scholarship.
Cape City had found its second new hero, and despite the occasional antitrust probe or successfully defended legal action, Albright was the city's savior, returning it to a position of greatness. For the next decade, Cape City grew and prospered. It was estimated that nearly two-thirds of Cape City's population, at one point in their life, will have worked directly or indirectly for Alexander Albright. As the young wunderkind grew into a respected adult, he became known as the kindly but stern "Uncle Al" to the people of the city. Yet despite this acclaim and adulation, Albright never chose to run for mayor, an election he would have won in a landslide.
Around the same time Exemplar began making himself known, other heroes began to emerge. The mysterious vigilante,
Vesper, began to make herself a known and feared threat to Cape City's underworld. Casting a shadow that would stretch from "Pain Hill" to Prince's Landing. Soon after Vesper reappeared, she apparently took on a junior partner, a young girl going by the name
Eventide. Other costumes adventurers followed on their heels, including
Stormbringer,
Rundown, and the return of the
Golem.
The revival of the Liberty Alliance, complete with several their core members from the war years —including the original Astarte, Tower of London, and Ultra-Marine — and subsequent reconstruction of their headquarters in Cape City's midtown certainly added to the optimism of those years.
THE DARK AGE: A Generation Divided
The string of disasters that was the 1990s started, near as anyone can tell, shortly after the
First Terminus Crisis. The venerable Liberty Alliance of America was disbanded, in favor of an expanded
Liberty Alliance Worldwide, now with four bureaus each responsible for a hemisphere:
Liberty Alliance East (Bejing),
Liberty Alliance North (Rome),
Liberty Alliance South (Addis Ababa), and
Liberty Alliance West (Washington DC). The Liberty Alliance's presence in Cape City had been taken by many as a sign of the city's continuing good fortune. The move did a great deal of harm to public morale.
The next source of major trouble came in 1993, with the arrival of the darkly beautiful,
Phobos. The mad woman engineered a mass breakout from the Castle Valley Super-Max Prison, located in Delaware Bay. Soon afterwards, she was seen tossing an apparently unconscious Astarte to the asphalt of Lane Street from atop the Daily Navigator building during the height evening business. However, the light-bringer apparently disappeared without a trace from the site of her fall, but soon returned with a new armored, masked costume and a new intensity that bordered on viciousness.
This viciousness escalated as she apprehended each of the Castle Valley escapees, to the point where one of the more recent inmates, Kyle Robinson, the super-thief known by the alias
Mad Cat, was allegedly left to die in a drainage ditch, bleeding out from a severed leg. Some sort of reevaluation of her methods must have followed, since after that battle, Astarte operated with a far less erratic personality. Less violence, more soundness of strategy and tactics, more attention to detail work... And another new costume, albeit still masked, but that hearkened back to her classic World War II appearance.
The biggest change the cityscape saw was 1995's battle between Exemplar and the grotesquely muscled creature dubbed
Revelation. As later verified by satellite images, the creature burrowed to the surface from an underground lair beneath the Sahara. After traveling across North Africa and walking across the Atlantic sea bed, nearly destroying the Liberty Alliance North and West, Revelation attacked Exemplar, engaging him in a battle that took him from eastern Virginia, near Williamsburg, all the way to the heart of Cape City.
The battle followed a path from the southern borough of Prince's Landing, across West Allen, and northward, roughly to the center of Clarkston, creating a roughly one-half-mile-wide path of destruction as it went, due to the fury of the combatants. Tragically, as witnessed by billions around the globe on television, the battle ended with both warriors apparently dead.
Exemplar's comrades in arms rebuilt the entire destroyed portion of the city shortly after Exemplar's funeral. This effort rebuilt the city block surrounding the spot where Exemplar made his final stand, as a memorial:
Exemplar Square.
Cape City would have fallen even further into despair at the loss of Exemplar, if one of the most mysterious members of the Liberty Alliance not shocked the world by unmasking before delivering his eulogy. The longtime ally of Exemplar and a founding member of the Liberty Alliance, the
Futurist, had secretly been Christopher Cartwright!
He had faked his death and handed control of his family business to Alexander Albright — his clone — in order to spare his city from his bad reputation. But from that day forward, following Exemplar's example, he no longer wanted to be a masked mystery man.
Following Cartwright's "return to the living," Cape City's spirit again soared, and rebuilding started increased dramatically, along with new business startups, especially in the technology sector.
THE IRON AGE: Generation X
During the
Terminus Crisis, when the omnicidal Destroyer of Worlds, Omega, attempted to destroy our very universe. The Libery Alliance managed to thwart his schemes, but in the wake of the crisis Liberty Alliance of America was disbanded, in favor of an expanded Liberty Alliance Worldwide. Then came Astarte's period of darkness and the death of Exemplar... The Nineties were a dark time for Cape City. But things would turn around, as the so often did.
During the Terminus Crisis, four youths from New York City were exposed to the strange dimensional energies of Omega's devices, gaining fantastic abilities and coming together to form the
Young Defenders.