Ivy Town is a university city in New England. It is the home of two of the three heroes known as the Atom: Ray Palmer and Ryan Choi.
History
In the year 1708, many of the religious leaders from the small town of Calvin City broke away from their Protestant forbears and established their own community across the Housatonic River, which would come to be known as Ivy Town. Although separated from their Calvinist cousins, the people of Ivy Town maintained a strong anti-British sentiment – a bias that ushered many young men to volunteer for the Colonial army at the onset of the Revolutionary War.
By the 1800s, however, Ivy Town grew into one of the most flourishing industrial centers in all of New England. An inventor named Marcus Silas Watkins financed the establishment of a strong scientific community, and by 1883, the fortune he had earned from various manufacturing patents laid the foundation for the building of Ivy University. Ivy University opened its doors in 1885, and has remained one of the premiere scientific institutes in the United States, rivaled only by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Ivy Town gained prominence in the late 20th century when a young physicist named Ray Palmer discovered a piece of white dwarf star matter. Ray focused the power of the celestial material through a specially designed lens, and discovered that he could shrink himself in size down to the subatomic level. Fashioning the lens into a belt, Ray donned a costume and became the super-hero known as the Atom.
Ray worked at Ivy University alongside a scientist named Alpheus V. Hyatt. Professor Hyatt discovered a microscopic quantum singularity through which matter could traverse backward and forward through time. Dubbing the singularity the Time Pool, Hyatt often aided the Atom in sending him into the time stream on various adventures.
As the years passed, the strange nature of Ray Palmer's experiments, the bizarre science of his shrinking abilities and his tampering with the time stream, gradually transformed the town. Little by little, the very laws of physical nature began to erode until finally breaking altogether. Today, Ivy Town exists as a living contradiction to the laws of science, a veritable magnet for time vortexes and quantum irregularities. Its various neighborhoods have descended into their own special forms of psychosis. It has become a critical nexus for the forces of magic and science, both of which seek to claim the town as their own.[1]
Points of Interest
- East Street
- Housatonic Bridge
- Housatonic River
- Ivy University
- Watkins Industrial Park
- West Street
Residents
- Alpheus Hyatt
- Atom (Ray Palmer)
- Atom (Ryan Choi)
- Dean Mayland
- Doris Zuel
- Enrica Negrini
- Helmond Kettering
- Jean Loring (Formerly)
- Martin Campbell
- Panda Potter (Deceased)
- Paul Hoben
- Thomas Dinawa
Sports
- Ivy Town Wolverines (basketball)
Notes
- Ivy Town earned its name due to an epidemic growth of ivy vines throughout the surrounding neighborhoods.
- Ivy Town's location has changed over the years.
- Connecticut: Super-Team Family #11, Amazing World of DC Comics #14, Atlas of the DC Universe and Action Comics (Volume 2) #7
- Massachusetts: Detective Comics #470 ("up in the Boston area"), World's Finest #250, Titans: Villains for Hire Special #1
- New York: Power of the Atom #8
- Rhode Island: Titans Secret Files and Origins #2
See Also
- Appearances of Ivy Town
- Location Gallery: Ivy Town
- Catalogued images related to Ivy Town