Sounds very much like the Castilian pronunciation of the name of the city we call Saragossa. But that's not such a bad place, that city, so maybe this isn't the ultimate source.

Hey, you linguistics squares, in rock language "Harra" means "utter undescribable and immense horror"--something so miserable words can't describe it. "It's a harra, man, a fucking harra."

"Gotha" means "the best fucking town in the world"

therefore, using Rock 'n' Roll logic, a Harragotha is an "immense horror in the middle of the best fucking town in the world"--so the neighborhood of 28th Street in Manhattan (Gotham) at the time this scribe was penciling his or her piece was a horror in the middle of Gotham (a Harragotha), which is New York City. That neighborhood today is in the middle the most desirable area of Manhattan now--50-story luxury buildings are going up like mushrooms growing wildly in a caveful of bat manure--it is no longer a harragotha. New York City is no longer Gotham either. Pretty thorough rock definitions can be found at the Urban Dictionary Website, which is easily Googled--

Ur fiend,

thegrowlingwolf

Obviously a fan of P G Wodehouse has been misheard talking of Aunt Agatha.

There are no more rough parts of Manhattan, unless you consider Starbucks a rough place. In which case, I sympathize.

Harrogate is a genteel Yorkshire spa town, now almost a suburb of Leeds, Bradford and York. It was long ago adopted by the upwardly-mobile.

Battersea and Clapham (pronounced roughly just like they are spelled) were two decidedly run-down bits of London, south of the River Thames, long ago adopted by the upwardly-mobile, and gentrified over the past few decades.

It became, for a time. 'smart' to refer to

Batter-sea as Bat-erzie
Clap-am as Cla'am.

Harrogate - huh-RAH-gutha ?