Mrs. Patrick Campbell and her monkey griffon, Pinky Panky Poo, paved the way for the first doggie day care center.
Saturday, May 7, 2022 11:00 a.m. EST
On Saturday, May 7, I will be leading a virtual presentation for the Municipal Art Society of New York called “The Dog Days of Gotham.” The presentation will be one of hundreds of virtual and guided tours that will take place the weekend of May 6-8 as part of Jane’s Walk NYC. Link to register is below.
During the 40-minute Zoom presentation, I will talk about some high-society pet dogs of the early 20th century, a time when lap dogs were as much a status symbol for wealthy socialites as were their diamonds and furs.
Join me as I share four of my favorite stories of wealthy and eccentric women of the Gilded Age and the dogs they adored. Hear about:
The monkey griffon that paved the way for doggie day care and the Plaza Hotel’s open pet policy
The French poodle with a $1 million dog yard on Fifth Avenue
The pampered French bulldogs that lived with a princess at the Gilsey House
The princess who lived at the Plaza Hotel with her pet dogs, alligators, bear cub, and lion cub
Registration for this free event is required in advance. To register, go directly to the link below (Click on The Dog Days of Gotham).
Jane’s Walks are organized by a network of city organizers around the world. Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was a writer, urbanist, and activist who championed the voices of everyday people in neighborhood planning and city building. Jane’s Walk is a community-based approach to city building that uses volunteer-led tours to make space for people to observe, reflect, share, question, and re-imagine the places in which they live, work, and play.
I am available for virtual author events across the United States and for in-person presentations in the New York City metropolitan region (including northern New Jersey and the Hudson Valley). If your organization or library is interested in hosting a program, please contact me at pgavan@optline.net. Click here for more information.
Pansy the cat-saving fire dog receives her free SPCA dog license from Special Agent George J. Salzer following her first rescue. NY Daily News, May 3, 1931.
In the mid 1930s, Engine Company 203 in Brooklyn had a veteran cat-saving fire dog that rescued several felines during his long career. For his heroics, “Nipper” received four commendations.
Nipper was not the only cat-saving fire dog who received rewards. A few years before this popular dog made his saves, Pansy of Engine Company 225 on Liberty Avenue in Brooklyn was rewarded for making her first rescue in May 1931—she raced into a burning building and chased out a cat.
Pansy was attached to the Liberty Avenue police station, but she ran to all the fires with Engine 225.
Although Pansy officially belonged to Police Emergency Squad 14 attached to the Liberty Avenue police station (the men had found her almost dead the previous summer and used an oxygen tank to revive her), the dog was a fire buff who answered all alarms with the nearby firehouse.
Following the cat rescue, Special Agent George J. Salzer of the S.P.C.A. presented Engine 255 Captain John H. Doherty with a free license for Pansy. The men told the press, “When there are more and better rescues to be made, Pansy will make them.”
Another cat-saving fire dog was Happy, who was attached to Engine 36 on Park Avenue two decades earlier.
Happy was attached to Engine 36, which was then located at 1849 Park Avenue.
On February 26, 1910, the East Harlem company responded to a fire in an apartment on the top floor of a tenement building at 2162 Fifth Avenue. During the fire, which was caused by an overturned oil lamp, Happy ran into the building with the firemen. He seized a Maltese cat by the nape of its neck and carried it outside.
About five hundred people, kept back by the reserves of the West 126th Street police station, cheered when the dog placed the cat on the sidewalk. According to the men, the cat had protested vigorously at first, and even scratched Happy on the nose, but the dog overlooked this indignity as he carried out his duties.
Back at headquarters, Happy reportedly refused to confirm or deny this part of the story. The cat did not confirm or deny overturning the lamp that started the fire.
These are President Calvin Coolidge’s cats, Blackie and Tiger, but they very well could have been the cats of Fire Patrol 3.
There was a deep gloom pervading the quarters of Fire Patrol 3 on West Thirtieth Street in August 1915. As the New York Sun noted, “If it were not for the absence of crape on the door, a visitor would be led to believe that the company had just lost its most popular member. The firemen move about without animation; their fighting spirit, developed through constant battle with fire and smoke, has disappeared.”
The reason for the despair was that Fire Patrol 3 was soon to lose its two beloved feline mascots.
The New York Fire Patrol was a paid fire salvage service organized and funded by the New York Board of Fire Underwriters to protect and preserve property and life during and after fires. Although not officially affiliated with the FDNY, the men worked alongside the city’s firemen and took orders from the FDNY commanding officer. Patrolmen were private civilians, but they were also firefighters trained in the art of salvage, forced entry, and overhaul.
Fire Patrol 3 was formed in 1894, with headquarters at 240 West Thirtieth Street, located in the crime-ridden Tenderloin district. The new four-story patrol house, which opened on September 10, 1895, featured stalls for five horses on the ground floor, a dormitory on the second floor, a large billiard room and sitting room on the third floor, and workshops and supply space on the top floor.
An elevator was in the rear of the building for passengers and freight. Behind the station was a two-story brick stable with feed rooms and a hayloft. This building had two box-stalls with a thick flooring of Irish peat, where the horses could recover from the long, hard runs.
Members of the Fire Patrol stood out from the regular fireman by their bright red helmets. Their well-equipped vehicles carried a 16-foot extension ladder, chemical extinguishers, hooks, axes, door-openers, brooms, shovels, buckets, ropes, and various other tools. Museum of the City of New York
Five years after their new house opened, the patrolmen were still without a mascot. They wanted one, but they did not want a canine mascot. As a salvage corps, the men of Fire Patrol 3 had an immense territory to cover—from river to river and from 14th Street to 57th Street—which made it impractical for them to have a dog trained to follow the apparatus to fires.
The home of Fire Patrol 3 at West 240 Thirtieth Street. NYC Department of Records, 1940.
So, when the opportunity to acquire a proper mascot presented itself at a fire at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-Eighth Street in October 1900, the men acted immediately.
According to the story, the men were working on an upper floor when they came upon two kittens on a rear fire escape. The kittens had been abandoned by the tenants in their flight to escape the burning building.
Being trained not to take anything from a fire scene that had an owner, the men tried to find the owners of the kittens. When no one came forward to claim the cats, the men adopted both. They named the tiger-striped kitten Bouncer and the coal black kitten Nellie.*
Bouncer was the more intelligent cat, although Nellie was also a smarter cat than most. Four months after moving into the patrol house, Bouncer had mastered the fire pole, wrapping all four paws around it before making his descent. When it came to the landing, he outdid every member, striking the rubber mat “as gently as an autumn leaf landing on the turf.”
Nellie’s specialty was riding to fire calls, curled up in one of the unused fire helmets.
Three years after Bounce and Nellie moved in, the men took on a pet goat named Willie, who lived with the horses in the stable. Willie got into some chaotic trouble in February 1903 when he took advantage of an open stable door and went on a half-hour romp along Fifth Avenue.
First, he charged at some young boys who were throwing snowballs at him and knocked one boy down. Next, he ran under carriages and several horses, who were not used to seeing goats running loose on Fifth Avenue. He also knocked a few pedestrians down.
Today, the home of Fire Patrol 3 is TwoFortyThirty, a private venue and shared creative space. Click on the link for a short video with interior photos. I think cats would love it!
As a crowd of cab drivers and small boys with sticks and snowballs chased him, he ran north to the Waldorf-Astoria, knocking down one of the hotel porters. Eventually he made his way back to the stable. As the New-York Tribune noted, “No one had been seriously injured.”
Sadly, by 1915, Willie was no doubt gone and the fifteen-year-old cats were blind and could no longer care for themselves. The thirty-two members of the salvage corps decided it best to put the two cats out of their misery in the most humane way possible. And so, they assigned Captain Jimmy Rice the job of sending for the ASPCA wagon to take them away to a painless death.
Everyone hoped they would not be on duty when the wagon called. Captain Rice told the press that when he signed the death warrant for Bouncer and Nellie, he would not sign his own name. He would only sign “Patrol 3. Commander Officer.”
Additional stories about Bouncer and Nellie will be featured in my upcoming book, The FDNY Mascots of Gotham, coming out next year.
*Nellie was not the cat’s actual name. Like many all-black animals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, her given name is now an offensive ethnic slur.
Following the birth of Tige’s kittens near the fingerprint room, a detective at Police Headquarters paw-printed each one.
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.
Tige gave birth at the NYPD headquarters building at 240 Centre Street. The monumental Beaux-Arts style building, which opened in 1909, featured a grandiose entrance hall and such amenities as a basement shooting range and printing center, carpeted offices for the commissioner and officers on the second floor, third-floor library, fourth-floor gymnasium with drill room and running track under the roof dome, fifth-floor radio broadcasting station and telephone exchange (formerly a telegraph bureau), and even a rooftop observation deck. As The New York Times wrote, “its grandeur contrasted utterly with the little buildings and crooked streets around it.”
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.
Chief Inspector John A. Lyons called for an investigation into the missing files.
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.
Numerous newspapers across the country published photos of Tige’s kittens being paw-printed at NYPD Police Headquarters.
A gaunt, orange tabby cat, a tiny poodle, and a few hysterical children walk into a church… No, this is not the start of a bad bar joke, but it was the start of a comedy of errors that took place at St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn on May 2, 1897. According to The New York Times, “never before had such a commotion been raised in this church.”
It’s a short but sweet tale–and with an orange-haired tabby, an Irish church, and an Irish philanthropist, it’s a purrfect cat tale for St. Patrick’s Day.
On Sunday evening, Rev. Father William J. Hill, the church’s pastor, was assisting in a Rosary procession with 150 children and many church elders. The three aisles of the church were filled with the young boys and girls. The boys were dressed in their Sunday best. The girls were all wearing white dresses and veils.
As Father Hill and his two assistants stood at the alter, one of the boys started to light the candles. The church was as quiet as a mouse, for a benediction was just about to begin.
Suddenly, a cat sprang out from under one of the altar chairs, frightening all in attendance. The cat sprang toward the left aisle, landing squarely on the head of Miss Celia Ledger, tearing off her veil. Then the cat sped down the aisle and in between the children, causing them to scream and go into hysterics.
About mid-way down the aisle, an elderly woman was sitting with her poodle. The poodle was a regular attendant at St. Paul’s Church, as he had been the woman’s constant companion at mass for the past two years.
This poodle was normally a quiet dog that had never before uttered a sound in the church. But the sudden appearance of the cat brought him into action. In one little leap, he jumped over his mistress’s lap and landed in the aisle, barking and yelping and causing the children to go into further hysterics.
For several minutes, the cat raced up and down the aisles. Father Hill ordered several of the ushers to chase down the cat. A few older boys joined in the chase. Eventually, the cat took cover somewhere the humans could not reach her. So ended the chase and the chaos.
St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church, 1934. New York Public Library Digital Collections
A Brief History of St. Paul’s Church in Cobble Hill
The story of St. Paul’s Church in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood is an Irish one. That is, the story of this church begins with an Irish immigrant named Cornelius Heeney.
Born in Ireland in 1754, Heeney came to America at the age of 30. He became a naturalized citizen in 1807.
According to Francis Morrone, author of “An Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn,” Heeney worked as a bookkeeper for the same Manhattan furrier that employed John Jacob Astor. When the furrier retired, he left the business to Heeney and Astor. The two men eventually split up, allowing Heeney to start his own fur trading business. It turned out to be a very lucrative business for him.
Following the great fire of Lower Manhattan in 1835, Heeney moved to present-day Cobble Hill, where he acquired farmland bounded by Court, Congress, Amity, and Columbia Streets. He built his home near the corner of Henry and Amity Streets.
Heeney was reportedly the first Catholic to hold public office in New York, serving five years in the New York State Assembly, from 1818-1822. It was during this time that Heeney met Andrew Morris, another Irish immigrant who served in the State Assembly. The two men would later purchase and then donate the land on which Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Mulberry Street in Lower Manhattan was built.
Although Heeney was a bachelor, he took a keen interest in children, especially orphans. He was also devoted to the Catholic Church. Among his many philanthropic endeavors, Heeney donated land and money to the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum and, along with the Astor family, founded the Brooklyn Benevolent Society.
In September 1836, Heeney donated a portion of his land for the site of a new Catholic church that had been proposed for residents living on the southwest side of Fulton Street. When the new St. Paul’s Church was built, it occupied a large field on the corner of Heeney’s farm, now the corner of Congress and Court Streets.
Dedication of the completed edifice took place on January 21, 1838, with the Bishop of the Diocese of New York, John DuBois, presiding. Less then ten years later, on May 3, 1848, Heeney passed away. His body was buried in the back garden of the church.
