Archive for the ‘Goats of New York’ Category

The Big Apple, the City That Never Sleeps, the City of Dreams. The city so nice, they named it twice has its share of nicknames. One of my favorites is perhaps its most obscure nickname: Gotham. Gotham is reportedly tied to Washington Irving, author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.” Irving […]

What happens when an Indiana bear, a Harlem goat, a large crowd of people, and a Wild West cowboy with a silver-plated revolver all come together at a beer garden on the beach? Yes, the following story is from my file called “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.” On January 8, 1886, two Harlem men […]

In 1900, members of the new Fox Hills Golf Club overlooking the Narrows began complaining to authorities about the goats that were running at large and interfering with their game. They claimed that the goats came from “Goatville,” a settlement near Rosebank inhabited primarily by Italian immigrants who held tightly to the old country customs and religion.

Patrick Doody and Edward Cody would prove their worth as mounted policemen in Sheepshead Bay, during the greatest roundup of goats in the history of Brooklyn.

The following story is dedicated in memory of the eight people who died in a building collapse in East Harlem, when a leak in a natural gas pipeline laid in 1887 exploded on March 10, 2014. If you’ve read Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence,” you may recall her describing “the one-story saloons, the wooden […]