Posts Tagged ‘Sunset Park’

The new electric traffic lights on 4th Avenue in Brooklyn were confusing to some motorists and pedestrians. But not to Nickie, the black cat of Motorcycle Squad No. 2 adjoining the former 18th Precinct police station on the southwest corner of 4th Avenue and 43rd Street in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park.

An unnamed, heroic stray cat and a mischievous mouse played a prominent role in a fire that forced a dozen families from the double brick apartment at 561 49th Street (present-day Sunset Park neighborhood) on December 4, 1908.

Weighing 20 pounds and standing about one foot tall, Susie was a jumbo cat. She was also the terror of the rats on the Kerr Steamship Company pier at the foot of 57th Street in the Bay Ridge section (now called Sunset Park) of Brooklyn. Susie would often kill up to 10 rats in a week; her record was eight rats in four hours.