Archive for the ‘Dog Mascots’ Category

Somewhere under an apartment building on West 121st Street, on a section of the street just east of Amsterdam Avenue called George Carlin Way, lies the body of a large Newfoundland who was buried on an early spring day in 1896. His grave, once “marked by a floral display seldom equaled by a rich man’s funeral,” is now under tons of concrete and steel. But the story of Nero, the beloved Newfoundland of Fire Patrol No. 5, will live on through this animal tale of Old New York.

A few weeks after a collie adopted the men of the Richmond Hill police station, he found a mother cat with newborn kittens in an alley near the police station. After carefully considering the situation, he decided to make preparations to be their knight in shining armor.

Bob was an intelligent greyhound owned by a young golfer named Miss Maud Beatrice Pottle of Bath Beach, Brooklyn. He was specially trained to be Miss Pottle’s golf caddy. She even made a harness for him which allowed him to securely carry her golf clubs.

In Old New York, almost every police station had a least one canine mascot in addition to one or more feline mousers. Although the cats seemed to get most of the press in those days, every once and a while a story about a police station’s mascot dog would appear in the paper. Oftentimes, the […]

A few years ago, I wrote about a mixed-breed dog who made herself at home at the excavation site of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) Joralemon-Street Tunnel under the East River. The men christened the dog Subway Nellie, in order to make sure no one confused her with all the other dogs named Nellie […]