“There were a lazy lot,” Wayne later said of the Gothamites. “Oh, they were burdened with other vices too, among them a gluttony which they entertained so long as it did not require effort of them. They were also formidably stupid. But indolence was their primary sin. It was as though the whole of them were cursed with sloth. I feel, however, that with divine assistance, my gifts are ideally suited to bring about a blessed and beneficial change.”
Solomon prevailed on a classmate’s father to help him obtain a federal judgeship and then, with what a contemporary described as “zealous glee,” he began his campaign to reform Gotham. As a judge, he dispensed the harsh justice of an Old Testament patriarch and as an entrepreneur, he started a dozen businesses. Within six years, he was Gotham’s leading citizen, and its most posperous. But he was not satisfied.
“I feel that my efforts have been insufficient,” he wrote to an uncle in Boston. “There is here nothing of that focus of piety and industriousness that marks the mighty cities of Europe. Indeed, at times I feel that Evil Seeps into our precincts from the areas of Godless Nature which surround us, that the Dark One rides the winds that waft through our lanes from the corruption fo the woodlands, depositing lodes of Malice in our eaves and crannies.”
Solomon discovered what he believed to be Gotham’s salvation when he met Cyrus Pinkney, a young architect who appeared in his court as the victim of an assault. Pinkney, several years out of university and yet to find a commission, showed Judge Wayne his portfolio of sketches and plans, and found his patron. Pinkney’s vision coincided perfectly with Solomon Wayne’s. A few months later, in a speech to the Property Holders Association, Wayne asked “What is a city, gentlemen? A sanctuary! A stronghold! A fortress! A bulwark against the godlessness of the wilds wherein we may nurture the fits of Christian civilization and be protected from the savagery which lurks in untamed nature.”
- See more at: http://batmangothamcity.net/solomon-wayne-and-cyrus-pinkney/#sthash.FwgSijVM.dpuf