On the morning of October 17, 1936, about 200 detectives, incidental police officials, and subjects in attendance for the daily line-up at the NYPD police headquarters on Centre Street were delayed 42 minutes. The cause of the delay was a green-eyed cat named Tige, a tabby cat with white markings who had given birth to quadruplets near the fingerprint room earlier that morning.
Tige had joined the NYPD a few months earlier in July 1936, displacing Inky, a previous headquarters cat. Inky, who allegedly spent most of her time brooding and emptying the inkwells, slunk away in a fit of jealousy when the expectant mother cat came under Commissioner Lewis Joseph Valentine’s jurisdiction.
Tige, after all, received much more attention than the do-nothing police cat. Even the police reporters, who camped out across the street from the NYPD headquarters, found time to buy hamburgers for Tige.
It was a few hours before dawn when NYPD Detectives Charles Harson and Sam Samuelson were poring over the morning’s fingerprints, which were being prepared for line-up. Hearing mewing sounds coming from behind a door leading to the fingerprint room, they left their work to investigate. About 40 minutes later they returned to report that Tige had given birth to four kittens.
When Assistant Chief Inspector John A. Lyons reached the office later that morning and did not see the usual sheaf of fingerprint sheets, he knew that the duplicate copies for the presiding officers would also be missing. He asked his personal aide, Acting Captain Arthur De Voe, and Inspector Joseph Donovan, head of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, to look into the matter.
The investigators found Harson and Samuelson working overtime at their desks, trying to prepare the sheath of fingerprint files. At 9:42 a.m., precisely, the daily line-up was under way. One day after the kittens’ birth, a detective recorded their paw prints on official NYPD fingerprint sheets in the fingerprint room.
The question is: I wonder if Tige and her kittens got along with Homicide, the flat-footed feline who moved into the police headquarters building in 1934? (For all we know, Homicide may have even been the father of these kittens!)
In 1973, the New York City Police Department moved out of Tige’s former home and into One Police Plaza, a red-brick box on Park Row near City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge. The glorious old headquarters building sat empty for years until finally, in 1983, the city accepted the proposal of developer Arthur Emil to turn it into luxury condominiums. Emil paid the city $4.2 million and spent another $20 million on renovating the building.
Today the building has 55 high-end condos, including one of the most unique residences in New York City: the 10-room apartment in the former gymnasium. Click here to see a short video of the 5,500-square-foot penthouse apartment in the central clock tower where Calvin Klein once lived. All that’s missing are a few police cats and kittens.
