Archive for the ‘Cat Stories’ Category

This quirky lobster 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 […]

On September 4, 1889, Benjamin G. Dovey offered a $10 reward for any information leading to the arrest of the person who had tossed a glossy black cat with tiger stripes from a top-floor window of the brick house at 28 West Fourth Street. “If I can discover the guilty wretch who hurled that poor, […]

In 1866, the New York State Legislature passed legislation authorizing the construction of an East River bridge to connect Manhattan and Brooklyn. A year later, the New York Bridge Company was incorporated and John A. Roebling, who presented a design for a 1,600-foot bridge, was appointed chief engineer for the Brooklyn Bridge. Following a series […]

Speck was an ordinary New York City cat who led an ordinary life in Frederick Turkowsky’s plumbing shop at 27 Second Avenue. Up until December 5, 1906, very few people on the Lower East Side, save for Frederick, even knew she existed. According to a plumbing trade journal published in April 1905, Frederick was already established […]

In the 1904 edition of King’s Views of Brooklyn, the Grand Union Tea Company building in Brooklyn’s present-day DUMBO neighborhood was listed as the “largest warehouse and factory in the United States for teas, coffees, spices, flavoring extracts, baking-powders and soaps.” By the mid-1920s, the Grand Union warehouse had 10 acres of floor space. In addition to a […]