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The Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane has been link with depravity and pain since the murder of Dr. Amadeus Arkham's wife and daughter in the 1920's. The Asylum has housed the most dangerous and insane criminals in Gotham since it opened. While the thoughts of Arkham as the center of evil in Gotham have been around since Dr. Amadeus Arkham's fall into insanity. The Asylums continued inability to heal or even contain those within it only serve to perpetuate this image.

The building itself is actually the Arkham family home, a Victorian-style manor. Following the apparent suicide of Elizabeth Arkham, after years of insanity, her son, Amadeus Arkham , vowed to help and heal those who needed it. He proceeded to renovate the home and convert it into a modern medical facility. While the intentions were good, the Asylum seemed to become merely a container at best. Very few of its inmates during this period were ever cured. The Asylum also proved very easy to escape from and was a revolving door for the most dangerous and insane inmates.

When Dr. Jeremiah Arkham, the nephew of the orginal Arkham, took over, he vowed to change this. He started by completely gutting and renovating the asylum. He added new corridors and cells and claimed the building to be "escape-proof." However, this was quickly proven false when the psychopath Mr. Zsasz was found to have secretly constructed an escape tunnel, and was using it to go on a killing spree while seemingly in the asylum.

The greatest blow to the "escape-proof" Arkham came in the form of Bane. To help in his scheme to break the Batman, Bane staged the greatest escape in Arkham's history. By using missles and bombs, he decimated the building and freed all of the inmates. The building was ruined and had to be reconstructed yet again. Dr. Arkham learned from the actions of Bane. The new Arkham contains reinforced steel walls, an automatic lockdown system, and is a fortress-like compound in the shell of a Victorian manor. The reconstruction proved so successful that the building was hardly damaged during the earthquake which leveled most of the city. Yet faced with supply and staff shortages caused by the earthquake, Dr. Arkham to release the inmates into the condemned city in order to save his own life. From that point, the Asylum became a ghost building, shut down for the forseeable future.

The building was briefly used by Batman in the era of No Man's Land as a satillite Bat-cave, a place he and his could use as a base of operations while in that area of the city. Yet with the reopening of Gotham, so came the reopening of Arkham Asylum. It has once again become the home for insanity and depravity, and the center of evil within Gotham.

Images of Arkham Asylum