Posts Tagged ‘New York History’

Part I: Guilty of Having Too Many Cats Many people ask me how I find all the stories for my Hatching Cat blog. One of the things I often do is search for keywords in the old newspaper archives that are available online. For this story, I searched for news articles about “too many cats.” […]

In 1893, American lyricist and playwright Harry S. Miller–at one time a New Yorker–wrote a comic song titled “The Cat Came Back.” The original chorus to the whimsical ditty, which today is still a popular children’s song (or at least it was when I was a kid in the previous century), always comes to mind […]

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 […]

This quirky animal tale of Old New York begins on a Sunday night in May 1910 when Gus, a brindle bulldog, walked into Fay’s restaurant at 255 West 125th Street in Harlem around 7 p.m. and sat down for dinner with his master. Gus was reportedly well behaved, so he was allowed to sit with his […]

NBC’s Katie Couric struck a nerve with the Dutch during the Pyeonchang Olympic Opening Ceremonies by saying the reason the Netherlands is so dominant in speed skating is because “skating is an important mode of transportation” for the people of Amsterdam when the canals freeze over. There was quite a lot of backlash from the viewers, […]