The City That Officially Changed Its Name for a Day
On November 15, 2013, street signs in San Francisco read “Gotham City.” The mayor held a ceremony at City Hall. Two black Lamborghinis in Batman livery circled the blocks between locations. None of it was for a film shoot.
It was for a five-year-old boy from Tulelake, California, named Miles Scott.
How does one child’s wish become an event large enough to require the cooperation of a major American city?
How Does One Child’s Fantasy Become a City’s Project?
Make-A-Wish Greater Bay Area grants wishes to seriously ill children every year. Most involve trips, a meeting with a favorite athlete, or something specific and personal in scale. Logistically, they are contained.
Miles’s wish was simple: he wanted to be Batman’s sidekick. Make-A-Wish took that one sentence and reverse-engineered it into a full day’s experience with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The organization did not stage a single photogenic moment. They built a narrative arc, the kind that has missions, villains, and a resolution. The question of why thousands of strangers then showed up to fill the streets is a separate one, and it gets answered at the end.
Miles Scott, Five Years Old, Diagnosed at Eighteen Months
Miles was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, known as ALL, at just eighteen months old. ALL is the most common form of childhood cancer; survival rates in children can run as high as 90 percent, according to Yale School of Medicine as cited by NPR, though the treatment is long and physically demanding. Miles and his family went through approximately two years of chemotherapy.
He completed his final course of treatment in November 2013, shortly before the event. By the time November 15 arrived, he was already in remission. That detail shifts the emotional character of the day considerably. This was not a farewell gesture for a child running out of time. It was a celebration for one who had, after years of treatment that began before he was old enough to understand what was happening to him, come through. His younger brother Clayton attended dressed as Robin.
The Architecture of a One-Day Superhero City
The day unfolded as a sequence of missions across real San Francisco locations. Miles first rescued a damsel in distress who had been tied to cable car tracks. Then Batkid foiled a bank robbery staged by the Riddler. Later, the Penguin, played by Mike Jutan, kidnapped Lou Seal, the San Francisco Giants’ mascot, and Batkid intervened to free him. Between missions, Miles traveled in the Batmobile, a pair of black Lamborghinis fitted with Batman decals. Eric Johnston, described as an inventor and acrobat, played the full-sized Batman who accompanied Miles throughout the day.
At the conclusion, Mayor Ed Lee presented Miles with an official key to the city at City Hall. The San Francisco Chronicle published a special edition under the masthead “Gotham City Chronicle,” with the headline “Batkid Saves City.” The underlying logic of the whole operation was to give Miles not one memorable photograph but a complete story he could live inside, with cause and effect, danger and resolution.
Thousands of Strangers, One Key, and What It Actually Meant
Crowd estimates from credible sources vary: figures range from around 12,000 volunteers on the lower end to approximately 25,000 total participants on the higher end, with the larger number likely counting everyone present rather than registered volunteers specifically. Either way, no one was paid to be there. No concert was scheduled, no fireworks, nothing on offer beyond the event itself. People came because the story had a shape they could understand and a human being at its center they could root for.
The reach did not stop at the city limits. President Barack Obama recorded a personal video message for Miles. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station sent messages of encouragement. On social media, estimates put the story’s reach at close to 2 billion people. In the months that followed, Make-A-Wish donations rose 26 percent worldwide and hospital referrals to the organization climbed 40 percent.
Miles passed his five-year cancer-free mark in 2018, at age 10. As of 2023, he remains cancer free and sees his oncologist once a year. A documentary about the day, Batkid Begins: The Wish Heard Around the World, directed by Dana Nachman, premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival on January 24, 2015, before a wider U.S. release on June 26, 2015. Julia Roberts has since announced plans to produce and star in a narrative feature adaptation of the story.
The key to the city that Mayor Lee placed in Miles’s hands was, by the end of that day, not entirely ceremonial.