Archive for the ‘Cat Stories’ Category

This story features a wealthy miser who lived frugally despite her wealth, about a dozen cats that lived with her in a dingy apartment, an ottoman stuffed with cash, and a few cows that made the Goelet family one of the richest landowners in midtown Manhattan in the 19th and early 20th century.

Mary Miner was a proverbial crazy cat lady who lived with about 50 cats in a small, dingy room on Hamilton Street. The room was one of many in a ramshackle tenement called The Ship, a building on the Lower East Side with an interesting history dating back to the 1700s.

I have added a new story to my Cats in Hats page. This one is about a cat who worked as a milk steward on the passenger ship S.S. President Harding, which sailed from New York to Germany in the 1920s.

As I find myself in a restrictive cast for a few weeks following ankle surgery, I have decided to distract myself from my foot by adding new content to the Hatching Cat. I was originally going to save this “Cats in Hats” project for my retirement years, but writing about old-time cats on the clock […]

The cat of the Sunshine Hotel is not a cat of Old New York. But the building where this resident mouser made his home in the 1990s, 241 Bowery, has an interesting history dating back to the 1830s with ties to much larger animals and old-time Bowery characters with names like Beefsteak John and Chick Tricker.