From the 1979/1980 Gotham Audio Catalog

History:

It was the 29th of August 1957 when Stephen F. Temmer, founder and president of GOTHAM, was introduced to the NEUMANN company in Berlin on the occasion of an official visit on behalf of the Voice of America. They amazed him with the very first stereophonic records cut with their equipment and the rest is history. There followed GOTHAM's appointment as the exclusive U.S. Representative for all of NEUMANN's disk cutting equipment, and soon after, this was expanded to include their world famous condenser microphone line as well.

As time went on GOTHAM obtained the U.S. and Canadian representations for the products manufactured by Albrecht, Beyer, Danner, EMT, Europafilm Plating, Klein+Hummel, Lyrec, NTP, Pyral, Studer, Telefunken and Woelke.

A West Coast Office, at the corner of Hollywood and LaBrea, was established in 1960. 1969 saw a further expansion of GOTHAM into the leasing business with the founding of Telden Leasing, which has provide the venture capital for many of today's most successful disk mastering and plating facilities.

GOTHAM EXPORT CORPORATION was founded in 1972 to take advantage of our world-wide family of representatives, most of whom carry the same lines of professional products. Export has flourished on an unprecedented scale representing such companies as Allison, Amber, Inovonics, Lexicon, MRL, Switchcraft, UREI and Weston.

Philosophy:

Ever since its founding in 1957, GOTHAM has tried to be "all things to some people," while most other suppliers of our industry try to adhere to the time-worn slogan of "all things to all people." In a highly profit-motivated world filled with manufacturers attempting to attract a mass market by watering down good engineering with inferior materials and workmanship, it is good to know that there are still companies of the Old World tradition, owned by people devoted to their craft, who find personal satisfaction in the excellence of equipment made in limited quantity for a discriminating world-wide clientele painfully aware of the true cost of inexpensive merchandise.

Many of these manufacturers bear the name of their Single owner. GOTHAM AUDIO, also a one-man ownership company, devotes itself to engineering advice and the dignified distribution and service of their products. Not price but excellence, craftsmanship and serviceability are the criteria on which GOTHAM bases its choice of companies to represent.