Archive for January, 2014

Recently, I wrote about Tom, the mascot of New York’s City Hall from 1891 to 1908. Tom may have acted as if he were the king cat of New York, but that’s probably because he didn’t know about his feline counterpart in Brooklyn. Jerry Fox, an enormous tiger cat “of striking appearance” who performed heroic […]

Once upon a time – June 1908, to be exact – an eccentric pseudo-princess portrait painter named Princess Lwoff-Parlaghy came to New York City, where she lived at the Plaza Hotel with a menagerie of wild animals.

I think it was Sport Hopper, the nine-month-old fox terrier of the Hopper household on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, whose much-publicized burial paved the way for the first pet cemetery in the United States.

It was a cold and wet day in 1891 when the homely tabby kitten with white paws first tried to make New York’s City Hall his manor home. Somehow he got the nerve to march up the steps and enter the front door, saunter down the long hallway, and calmly begin to lick his fur dry.