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.
The monkey was described as “the organ-grinder type,” like this monkey pictured in 1935. Museum of the City of New York Collections
When Martin Ward, the attendant at Roche’s Beach Pavilion in Far Rockaway, Queens, found a tiny monkey in the bathing house, he brought him to the proprietor of the private beach resort. Edward Roche didn’t know what to do with the monkey, so he called the nearby police station for some help.
Patrolman Norman King, the largest police officer of what was then the 279th Precinct, responded to the beach resort. When he got to Roche’s, he found about three hundred children surrounding a little monkey of the “organ-grinder type” wearing a life-saving belt and a red bathing suit adorned with rosettes.
Apparently, some Yale undergraduates had spent the day at the Far Rockaway beach resort the previous afternoon, so King believed that a few sophomoric young men may have had something to do with the bathing beauty.
King placed the tiny monkey in his pocket and walked back to the police station, which occupied an old frame building on the south side of Broadway (present-day Cornaga Avenue) opposite Mott Avenue. As he walked up Beach Nineteenth Street toward Broadway, the children followed behind, no doubt delighted by the monkey peeking out from the policeman’s pocket and making faces at them.
Lieutenant Scoville didn’t know how to enter the monkey in the blotter, so he noted the animal as “lost, strayed, or stolen.” Then he tied the little primate to a post on the back porch.
The men told a New York Times reporter that they never had a prisoner that required so much work. It was determined that at least five policemen had to stand guard over the monkey in order to keep him in line.
The fate of the monkey in the red bathing suit was not reported, but for one day, at least, the men of the Far Rockaway police station could claim they had a monkey prisoner.
A Brief History of Roche’s Bathing Pavilionat Far Rockaway
Edward Roche was the son of David Roche, a Far Rockaway pioneer with vast real estate holdings along South Street (Seagirt Boulevard). One of Roche’s largest holdings was the Tack-a-Pou-Sha House at Heyson Road, which had been constructed around 1890. The large hotel replaced the family’s smaller hotel on the same site and was named for Tackapousha, a Lenape native who was the first person to sell land in the Rockaway Peninsula to a European.
The large, four-story hotel could accommodate 300 guests, and offered stables for horses and carriages (and later a garage for motorized vehicles). The hotel was so successful that Roche constructed an annex, which he called the Dolphin Roadhouse and Hotel. Altogether, the two buildings featured a casino, restaurant, bowling alleys, billiard rooms, supper rooms, and a few single rooms for men.
In this photo, the Dolphin is on the left and the Tack-a-Pou-Sha is on the right. The Dolphin was later moved about two blocks and the Tack-a-Pou-Sha was destroyed in a fire in 1923.
In 1906, Edward purchased the property of the United States Hotel, which for years had stood next to the Tack-a-Pou-Sha House. The large hotel had been torn down during the winter months, and Roche planned on erecting 12 cottages upon the spacious grounds.
In addition to the cottages, Roche was at this time completing 1,000 new bathing houses along his 700 feet of beachfront property, which extended from Beach 17th to Beach 20th Streets. The bathing houses were divided into two sections: one for transient guests and the other for families who paid an annual membership fee ($7.50).
In 1912, Edward inherited his father’s holdings. He modernized the Tack-a-Pou-Sha and converted the Dolphin (which he had moved) to a rooming house. He also built four new hotels between Beach 17th and Beach 19th Streets as well as a large apartment complex.
Over the years, Roche’s Bathing Beach continued to grow in order to meet the demands of beachgoers and keep up with the competition. In addition to the bath houses (now 2,000), the resort offered chair and umbrella rentals, consignments and cigar booths, showers, manicuring services, hot saltwater baths, tennis courts, and handball courts.
For the kids, there was a park that featured slides, chutes, climbing towers, and seesaws. Adults had access to an athletic director, who assisted them with setting up games such as volleyball, ping pong, beach tennis, calisthenics, and baseball (all sports equipment was rented out for free).
Edward Roche also owned these four guest hotels along South Street (Seagirt Boulevard); the houses are also noted in the 1912 map below.
In the early 1900s, a small steamboat called the Oysterette took bathers to the new sandbar that was forming where the outer beach, aka Hog Island, had existed before it disappeared during a great storm in the fall of 1893. Prior to that devastating storm, all the main bathing establishments of the Rockaways were located on the island, and two ferries transported people from the mainland (one boat operated along a cable and the other by sail).
On this 1901 map, the Tack-a-Pou-Sha House is at the right, on South Street (Seagirt Boulevard). The bathing pavilion, guest hotels, and bath houses have not yet been constructed.
On this 1912 map, Tack-a-Pou-Sha House is at the top right and the new bathing houses are along the water’s edge; the new guest houses are also noted. To the left of the bath houses is the Colony Club, which was an exclusive members-only club that leased land from Roche.
When Edward Roche died of a heart attack at the age of 77 in December 1930, he left almost his entire estate, valued at $10 million, to a trust fund called the Edward and Ellen Roche Relief Foundation, the income from which was to be used to aid destitute women and children. Edward had never married, and his sister had died a year earlier, leaving only five cousins as the nearest living relatives. The cousins all contested the will, stating Roche was incompetent when he left his entire will to aid destitute women and children.
By November 1931, all of the cousins had withdrawn their claims and the will was admitted to Probate Court in Jamaica. Mrs. Margaret Rott, the nurse who had cared for Edward during his last 125 days of life, demanded she receive $125 to pay for the cost of two meals a day during that period (50 cents a meal).
Roche’s Beach continued operating through the 1950s. However, since 1937, title to the beachfront from Beach 9th to Beach 149th Street has been vested in the City of New York.
Edward Roche was buried at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea Cemetery in Lawrence, Nassau County. The last remnants of his beach and Ostend Beach were razed in 1963 to create O’Donohue Park, in honor of Mary O’Donohue, who purchased the land in 1868.
Aerial view of the former Roche’s Beach in Far Rockaway.
“Somewhere in New York there is wandering in a dark alley or a secluded street, perhaps in a starving condition, an heiress to part of a small fortune.”—Baltimore Sun, August 3, 1925
Mrs. Elizabeth W. Berhm, a kindly widow of about 61 years old, had always devoted herself to animals. She was known in her Carnegie Hill neighborhood as the “cat woman” because her home was always open to stray cats. In her small, two-room apartment at the rear of 172 East 85th Street, milk and kindness were always waiting for any cat that needed it.
No doubt, then, the neighbors must have been shocked to learn that Elizabeth had almost taken the life of her own pet cat, Dunder, while she committed suicide.
Born in Germany in 1864, Elizabeth Berhm came to America in 1880. She and her husband, Eugene, married late in life, following the death of Eugene’s first wife, Pauline, in 1914.
Ten years Elizabeth’s senior, Eugene owned a cigar store and had one grown son, also named Eugene. According to census reports, Elizabeth and Eugene had been living in the Carnegie Hill apartment on East 85th Street since at least 1920.
Sometime during the spring of 1925, Eugene was killed by an automobile (I don’t know if he was in the car or if the car struck him while he was walking). Alone in the world, Elizabeth focused all her time and affection to stray animals.
Elizabeth W. Berhm lived and died in a small rear apartment at 172 East 85th Street (middle). NYC Department of Records, 1940
Although she already had Dunder, a house cat who was about seven years old, the number of Carnegie Hill stray cats that visited her home increased every week. Even the stray dogs considered her a friend.
But despite all the attention she got from her animal friends, the grieving widow could no longer go on without her husband.
On Saturday night, August 1, 1925, George Hess, the janitor for the five-story tenement building, smelled gas. After tracing it to Elizabeth’s apartment, he summoned Policeman Christian Kiel of the East 67th Street Station. Officer Kiel smashed a window and found Elizabeth lying on the floor next to her bed.
Apparently, she had struggled while the gas came to her through a tube attached to a chandelier. When she fell off the bed, she tore the lighting fixture from the ceiling. The gas quickly filled the room.
After instructing Hess to call for medical help, Officer Kiel found Dunder squirming in a corner, trying to fight off the effects of the gas. The policeman tossed the cat out the window so she could get some fresh air.
Physicians attempted to revive Elizabeth with a Pulmotor, but they eventually had to give up and pronounce her dead. As Officer Kiel was jotting down the outcome in his notebook, Dunder came back into the room. Completely revived by the fresh air, he meowed loudly as he watched over his dead mistress.
The Pulmotor, invented by Heinrich Draeger in 1907, was the first mechanical resuscitator used outside of a hospital setting. The FDNY began distributing the machines to select fire companies in January 1914 due to a steady increase in gas emergencies.
While searching through the apartment, police found a photograph of Eugene. On the back of the photo was printed, “Please bury this with me.”
Upon further investigation, they found a will and a note stating she could no longer live without her husband. In her will, she had directed that part of her $4,000 estate go towards providing a comfortable home for Dunder for the rest of the cat’s life. The rest was to be divided among the city’s homes for cats and dogs.
Baltimore Sun, August 3, 1925
Hess agreed to take care of the cat temporarily, so he brought the cat to the cellar (you’d think he would have taken the $4,000 and promised to care for the cat forever). When he went to look for her the next morning, she was gone. Hess searched the apartment building from cellar to roof, with no success.
She evidently had wandered away, still dazed and confused by her experience, and obviously not loving her new living conditions. As the Daily News wrote, “Today the former pampered apartment pet is trying to scrape a precarious living out of the alleys and gutters of New York, in competition with cats who have been doing it all their lives.”
A story about Dunder in the Muncie Evening Press said, “She knew little of the ways of alley cats in New York. She had no education in the finesses of snitching fish from fish markets or getting into secluded back yards and helping herself to spilt milk and bits of food. Like all other cultured cats thrown suddenly upon their own resources, she may starve to death, while a fortune, as reckoned when the standards and needs of cats are considered, await her.”
Muncie Evening News, August 6, 1925
When asked how the cat would be found, Hess said he didn’t have a clue as there was no one alive who could positively identify the cat. At first it was reported that Dunder was an Angora, but Hess disputed that. He said she was just a plain, large black cat, “respectable without having been necessarily aristocratic.”
As one New Jersey newspaper observed, “Any one of a million alley cats can claim part of a $4,000 bequest because there is no human being who can positively identify Dunder, the rightly legatee.”
Several fictional cats responded to the story, including Thermy, the weather cat for the Evansville Press in Indiana. Thermy theorized that poor Dunder had drowned and gave thought to traveling to New York to claim he was Dunder and collect the money. The cat “wrote” the following:
“With milk selling at seven cents a pint, I could have cream for the rest of my life! And believe me, if I get that $4000, no more forecasting for me. The only predictions I’ll make then will be for three round bowls of rich cream per diem. The forecast? Oh, guess at it!”
Incidentally, Elizabeth’s suicide was not the first horrific event that had taken place in the tenement building at 172 East 85th Street.
In 1890, Henry Colwell stabbed his wife, Louisa, seven times in the hallway of the building during a drunken assault. Henry was arrested but he tried committing suicide by cutting the veins of his legs. Louisa was taken to the hospital, but she was not expected to live.
And in 1895, John Hill, a 32-year-old man living in the building, attempted to kill himself by cutting his throat. He was severely wounded and taken to Harlem Hospital. A year later, John Haggerty suddenly died in the apartment of unknown causes.
Whether the late 19th-century tenement building on East 85th Street was jinxed or not, we do know that it was constructed on the southern-most edge of what would become known as Carnegie Hill, named for the mansion that Andrew Carnegie built on Fifth Avenue and 91st Street in 1902.
The Andrew Carnegie Mansion at 2 East 91st Street. The mansion was the first American residence to have a steel frame and among the first homes to have a private Otis Elevator and central heating.Today, the mansion houses the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum.
“Carnegie Hill: The future site of Andrew Carnegie’s mansion on Fifth Avenue and 91st Street. Andrew Carnegie purchased this land–the equivalent of two Fifth Avenue block fronts between 90th and 92nd Streets–for $800,000 in 1898. Back then, squatters occupied 91st Street and there was a riding academy on 90th Street.
The earliest known history of this part of Manhattan goes back to a seasonal village for the Algonquian Nation Konaande Kongh, which was located on a hillside stretching between present-day 93rd and 98th Streets along Park Avenue. The village was surrounded by dense woods of maple trees and berry bushes to the west and a cultivated fertile plain to the east for growing vegetables and herbs.
In October 1667, Governor Richard Nicolls granted large tracts of land in New Haerlem (which encompassed from about 74th Street to 129th Street) to Thomas Delavall, John Verveelen, Daniel Tourneur, Joost Oblinus, and Resolveert Willliam Waldron. The patent included all houses, buildings, barns, stables, orchards, gardens, mills, ponds, fencing, and other natural and man-made structures on the land.
Waldron’s allotment was known as Hellgate or Horne’s Hook, and primarily encompassed the land from 75th to 94th Streets between Third Avenue and the East River. The family home, Waldron Hall, was located north of 86th street and east of Avenue A. Built in 1685, It was demolished in 1870 following a fire.
Following Resolveert’s death in 1690, the Waldron Farm passed through several generations of Waldrons, including Samuel, Johannes, William, and Adolph. At one point, the farm comprised 156 acres, which included the original patent plus additional lands acquired throughout the years.
Just prior to the Revolutionary War, Abraham Durye, a New York merchant, purchased the farm at auction. Although Durye’s heirs retained a small tract near 93rd Street, most of the irregular, triangular tracts were conveyed through the early 1800s to John G. Bogert, Nathaniel Sandford, Xaviero Gautro, Natianiel Prime, Edward Douglas, and William Rhinelander.
Land speculation in the Carnegie Hill area did not go into full swing until the late 1870s, with the opening of the IRT Third Avenue Elevated Railroad in 1878.
This illustration depicting the area of Fifth Avenue and 96th Street was created in 1875. New York Public Library Digital Collections
Henry slides down the pole while Cappy watches, 1941.
In 1903, one of the most popular dog-and-cat dynamic duos of the FDNY were Dan and Nickie* of Engine Company No. 65. Dan was a well-loved coach dog (possibly a Dalmatian), and Nickie was a jet-black cat who was the pet of Captain Hawk.
According to the nationally published news story, Hawk rejoined the FDNY as an assistant foreman of Engine Company 29 on Chambers Street shortly after the Spanish-American War of 1898. One day, a disheveled stray cat followed him into the station. The cat was incredibly affectionate and intelligent, so the men agreed to adopt him as an unofficial member of the company.
When Hawk was appointed captain of the newly organized Engine Company No. 65 on West 43rd Street, the cat was “officially transferred” to the new company. FDNY Commissioner John Jay Scannell, the first fire commissioner of the new consolidated New York City, gave the transfer his official seal of approval.
Not much is known about Nickie, except that he always slept in Hawk’s bed at night. Whenever an alarm sounded, he would jump out of bed faster than the captain. (Apparently, experience taught him to respond quickly—it was better than getting tossed to the floor.)
The cat would then rush for the first step of the iron stairs and curl up into the smallest possible space to avoid the onslaught of stomping feet. From this vantage point, he would watch as the horses were hitched up and the engine rolled out.
Cappy, the Beloved FDNY Dalmatian
In 1936, a fire buff named C.J. Jones of Cliffside Park, New Jersey, entered the fire station carrying a young Dalmatian puppy. The men named him Cappy and made him a mascot of Engine Company No. 65.
Whenever an alarm sounded for the station, Cappy would jump onto the fire truck—where he “occupied a seat of honor”—and ride to the scene with the fire fighters. He loved the speed, and as he balanced on his perch, he’d lift his muzzle into the wind and treasure every moment of the adventure. Sometimes, when the engine was taking a sharp curve, passersby would gasp because Cappy seemed to be hanging on by only his toenails.
Cappy of FDNY Engine Company No. 65, 1939
At first, the men allowed Cappy to follow them into burning buildings. In fact, according to several newspapers, he not only carried a cat out of burning building, he actually went to the Ellin Prince Speyer Hospital for Animals to visit her while she was recovering!
Eventually, as Cappy got older, the men had to secure his leash to the seat so he would not join them (the leash also kept him from rolling off the truck as it took sharp curves). As soon as the men returned safely to the truck, he would welcome them back by licking their hands.
When he wasn’t responding to fire calls, Cappy could often be found waiting patiently each day in front of a Spanish restaurant for his daily handout. He had to watch his figure, though, because Cappy was an advertising star.
You see, Engine Company No. 65 just happened to be near the city’s advertising district. Since Cappy was so handsome and photogenic, the firemen offered his services as a model for national magazines.
“He could sell anything,” Captain Edmund Brennan told a reporter. “Illustrators hired him at $5 a day and he was worth it. He could sell anything from an auto to a polio fund subscription.” The men kept a special bank account for Cappy’s earnings, which they used for his food and occasional veterinary bills.
In March 1939, Cappy reportedly went missing after leaving the firehouse for his daily constitutional trip around the neighborhood at 8 am. He was last seen about thirty minutes later ambling northward, having just inspected some subway construction at Sixth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street.
Mrs. George Bethune Adams, resident director of the Ellin Speyer Hospital for Animals, posted a generous reward for his safe return. He eventually returned home, but my theory is that he was at the animal hospital at this time, visiting the cat he had saved from the burning building.
In 1941, Cappy and two of his sons—Raffles and Beau—took part in an exhibition of 25 FDNY Dalmatians at the Westminster Kennel Club’s 65th annual dog show at Madison Square Garden. Although the press surmised that Cappy would do well based on his experience with posing for advertisements, it was King, belonging to Fireman George F. Donnelly of Hook and Ladder 311 in Queens, who was crowned the top pooch of the FDNY.
During this time, Engine Company No. 65 had another mascot cat named Henry. Like Peter, the pole-sliding cat of Bushwick, Brooklyn, Henry would slide down the pole with the firefighters whenever an alarm came in for the station. In 1941, a photographer captured Henry sliding down the pole and Cappy watched from below. The photo was published in numerous newspapers across the nation and now adorns my office wall.
Firemen Francis Hickey and Eugene Uhl trim Cappy’s grave following his funeral at the Bide-A-Wee cemetery on May 11, 1950
Poor Henry disappeared in 1942, which was the same year Cappy took his last rides on the fire engine. By then the modern equipment was so fast it was difficult for him to keep his balance when the equipment took a corner, especially with his aging paws. So, he remained back at the station house where his bed was near the warm chimney. He reportedly brooded over his retirement and whimpered when the trucks rolled out until he finally dozed off into a fitful sleep.
In April 1950, Cappy began to shake and drink excessive amounts of water. The firemen took him to the Ellin Prince Speyer Hospital for Animals, where he was diagnosed with uremic poisoning.
Dan, Nickie, Cappy, and Henry lived in this firehouse at 33 West 43rd Street. Designed by architects Hoppin & Koen, the firehouse was completed in 1898. NYC Department of Records tax photo, 1940
The following Thursday a funeral was held at Bide-a-Wee animal cemetery in Wantaugh, Long Island. Brennan, Francis Hickey, and Eugene Uhl were the only ones who could attend the ceremony, “but they brought with them the grief of all 31 desolate men in New York who couldn’t attend.”
A fund was initiated to purchase a grave marker for Cappy. The monument was topped with a marble fireman’s hat inscribed with the number 65. Brennan told the reporter, “We’ll be out every so often to say ‘Hello’ to Cappy. He never forgot us, and we’re not forgetting him.”
Following the funeral, the men hung a photo of Cappy framed in ribbon and topped with a mourning palm outside the firehouse. The legend under the photo read: CAPPY—1936-1950.
On the door to the firehouse, they chalked up a code signal: 5-5-5-5. Our Mascot. 8:30 AM. (5-5-5-5 is the department’s code for a death in its ranks.)
Asked if the company would ever get another dog, Captain Brennan shook his head and replied, “No, I don’t think so. No dog could replace Cappy. Not for Engine Co. 65.”
