Join me on Tuesday, June 30, at noon, as I take you back in time to explore New York’s maritime history while sharing some amazing stories of famous (and not-so-famous) seafaring cats of Old New York. These are all some of my favorite nautical tales from my Hatching Cat website and my book, The Cat Men of Gotham, with lots of historical content and great pictures.
We’ll explore the history of the Chelsea Piers, Brooklyn Navy Yard, New York Docks, and Red Hook while meeting some memorable nautical felines and the sailors, dock workers, and ship captains who came to their rescue–and came to love them.
Hear about: The Pirate Cats of Chelsea Piers Who Celebrated Christmas on the RMS Olympic The Mascot Cats of the Seaman’s Church Institute of New York The Little Black Kitten Presented to Captain Arthur Rostron, the Hero of the RMS Carpathia The Viking Cat Who Was Rescued by Lifeboat en Route to Brooklyn The Navy Cat Who Survived the Explosion on the USS Maine The Brave and Brawny Cats of the Brooklyn Navy Yard — and more
Fun for cat lovers and New York maritime history fans alike!
Details: Tuesday, June 30, 12-1 p.m. (ET) Virtual Zoom presentation Hosted by Untapped New York
Madame Adjie Castillo with one of her trained lions in 1897. It was in this small cage that a mother cat gave birth to kittens at the Circle Theatre.
During the week of June 14, 1903, Madame Adjie and Her Trained Lions was the headline act at the Circle Theatre on Broadway. At the beginning of the week, Adjie had 1 male lion and two lionesses. By the end of the week, she also had a mother cat and several kittens.
Madame Adjie Castillo was born in Saginaw, Michigan, on December 25, 1867. According to news reports, her mother was a Pueblo Indian and her father was a Spanish Jew. Apparently one or both of her parents performed with animals; Adjie was welcomed into the Bostock show when she was a young child, where she learned how to train all kinds of animals.
Sometime during the late 1890s, Adjie teamed up with a lion trainer named Frank Hall on the vaudeville circuit. On stage, she played guitar and sang Spanish songs to the lions. She also wore ruffled Spanish costumes, which the lions pawed at and tore. “The paid for the dresses,” she once told a reporter. “They made money for me, so why not?”
I can’t imagine how the photographer was able to keep these lions still long enough to get such a great photo. The details in this old print are amazing.
Adjie’s relationship to Hall is sketchy: one newspaper article from 1899 said they were married at that time; another said they married in 1910. Still another newspaper said Adjie was engaged to a Brooklyn man named Emerson D. Dietrich, who was “killed and partly devoured” by six of Adjie’s lions during a show in Chicago in June 1914. According to the Fort Wayne News, Emerson was Adjie’s manager and press representative; the two were going to get married that summer.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 1914.
The Mother Cat Joins the Pride
On June 17, 1903, the New York Evening World reported that a very daring cat gave birth in the cage occupied by Adjie’s lions at the Circle Theatre. Why she chose that dangerous and awkward space to have her kittens is anyone’s guess. The question of why the lions didn’t attack her is also up for grabs.
At first, the lions did not know what to make of the intrusion. They growled a bit and swished their tails.
The mother cat did not let the lions disturb her, and she acted as if she didn’t have a care in the world. She would blink back at them whenever they glanced in her direction, as if to say “leave me alone, I’m busy now.” The little kittens also appeared quite content in their new world on the Circle Theatre stage.
The Evening World, June 17, 1903
Eventually, the lions began to wag their tails good naturedly, and then “they marched over and paid Mrs. Cat a congratulatory call.” At one point, the smallest of the kittens tried to poke the largest lion in the eye, but all the lions and kittens got along famously together.
According to the Evening World, the mother cat and the lions had a long talk, and it was decided that the two families should live together.
Madame Adjie continued working with lions for about 25 years, during which time she raised 116 lions to maturity. In addition to the death of her fiance in 1914, she had one other reported bad accident in 1899, while performing at the Dewey Theatre in New York City.
Apparently, she had tried to coax a lioness over a hurdle, but the large cat attacked her and ripped her right arm from shoulder to wrist. Thirty stitches were required to close the wound. Several women in the audience fainted.
In her later years, Adjie appeared in two silent films: “The Christian” and “The Sign of the Cross” (in both films, a lion was the menace).
A big fan of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adjie joined the Works Progress Administration in 1936 at the age of 60 (photo at left) and worked on jobs in New York City.
There is very little information published about Adjie and her lions, so I do not know where or when Adjie passed away. I also do not know how long the cat family remained with her lions.
Columbus Circle and the Circle Theatre
Opened in 1901 by Charles E. Evans and his theatrical manager and partner, W.D. Mann, the Circle Music Hall at 1825 Broadway in Columbus Circle was designed to present “high class, polite vaudeville” aimed at middle-class families who lived in the neighborhood. I guess for one cat, at least, this also meant that the venue was a great place to bring kittens into the world.
The location of the theater, at Broadway and 60th Street, was formerly the farm of John H. Tallman, depicted in the map and illustration below.
Randel Farm Map, showing 53rd to 61st Street, from Sixth Avenue to Ninth Avenue, September 1, 1820. The Tallman farm is in the top left corner.
An illustration of 59th and Eighth Avenue created in 1861, with Bloomingdale Road (Broadway) emerging from the bottom center towards the left, and Eighth Avenue and Central Park on the right. The farmland of John H. Tallman is depicted. Ten years later, this would be the site of Columbus Circle, the gateway to Central Park. Lithograph by George Hayward for D.T. Valentine’s Manual, 1862.
Columbus Circle was designed as a traffic circle for horses and carts in 1857 by Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who partnered with Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould to design much of Central Park. Clearing of the farmland began in 1868; the current circle was redesigned in 1905.
Shortly after the music hall opened, a neighboring church reportedly objected to an entertainment venue so close. Following a nearly-year-long legal battle, the church won out, and Evans and Mann were forced to change their venue to an orchestra hall. The public had no interest in such a venue, and thus is was closed by the end of 1901.
The original Circle Theatre at Broadway and 60th Street was designed by architect Charles Cavenaught. This photo was taken in 1903–the year the cat gave birth to her kittens in the lion cage. Museum of the City of New York Collections.
In 1902, an agreement was reached with the church and the Music Hall became the Circle Theatre, now under new management. For a few years, the theater presented only legitimate theater, but within a couple of years, vaudeville was back in. By 1905, when the nearby Colonial Theatre began presenting vaudeville acts, the Circle Theatre switched from lion shows and other acts to burlesque. Occasionally, early motion pictures were also presented at the Circle Theatre.
Columbus Circle in 1912. The Circle Theatre is at the very far left.
In 1906, the Circle Theatre was completely remodeled by Thomas W. Lamb (the roof was raised, a second balcony was added, and the Broadway facade was rebuilt in Neo-Classical style). The Circle Theatre returned to legitimate theater for a few more years until returning to vaudeville and burlesque before Loew’s stepped in to run the theater as a movie house.
Inside the Circle Theatre, 1902. MCNY Collections
Loew’s shut the theater down in 1931, and it operated for the next few years as an independent movie theater. In 1935, during a labor dispute, a bomb tossed into the theater caused massive damage to the lobby and box office.
In August 1935, labor bombers tossed lethal “pineapple bombs” into the lobbies of the Circle and Park Theaters, both owned by the Consolidated Theater Company at that time.
Columbus Circle Roller Rink, 1942. MCNY Collections
The Circle Theatre was gutted in 1939 and rebuilt as the Columbus Circle Roller Rink. The rink survived until 1954, when most of the western side of Columbus Circle was bulldozed for the construction of the old New York Coliseum Convention Center.
The Coliseum closed in January 1998; demolition began in the winter of 2000. The Time Warner/Related joint project, called the Time Warner Center, now stands on the site where a mother cat once gave birth to kittens in a lion’s cage.
The following story is taken word-for-word from the New York Sun. While I seldom ever repeat a news article in full, I don’t feel I can do these poor Hell’s Kitchen cats of Old New York any more justice than the Sun reporter tried to do 113 years ago.
It’s also a great article with the timeless themes of rich vs poor and weak vs strong, and a novel way to explore how one’s birth place and environment greatly affect one’s odds of survival — from a cat’s perspective. So without further ado…
The Cats of Hell’s Kitchen
The cats of Hell’s Kitchen are tough cats. They are tough for the same reason that the cats of Fifth Avenue are genteel. It is all a question of environment.
A Hell’s Kitchen cat transported to Fifth Avenue would probably dive beneath the sofa and remain there until it died. Were a Fifth Avenue cat suddenly dropped off in Hell’s Kitchen, it would die foolishly within a half hour from one (or more) of a dozen causes.
Tommy Casanova Lamb was a Hell’s Kitchen cat whose luck changed for the good when he wandered into the Lambs Club on 44th Street when he was just a kitten. Tommy became a life member of The Lambs. To this day, his picture hangs in their clubhouse on West 51st Street.
Along all the length of Tenth Avenue from Thirty-second to Forty-fifth there is not a tabby that takes a kind word at its worth. Stop in the middle of a sidewalk some midnight when all the street is deserted save for the shadows that slink from ash barrel to areaway and back to the random lumber pile and call kindly after one of the black streaks that dash across the line of light from the street lamp. It will stop for a fraction of a minute.
Whisper after it soothingly and bend down in inviting attitude and that blotch against the gray of the pavement will dart out of sight in a twinkling. The law of life for cats and men in Hell’s Kitchen is the same; only the swift and the ready in battle live to eat.
A Hell’s Kitchen cat is born where no boy can find it and where no man can crush out its life. Nor must the lean mother forget that there are dogs and larger cats to worry the life out of her young. Away back in the darkness under some tenement or in the loft of a ramshackle barn is the nursery.
Through some hidden crack the mother dodges in and out in the forage for food and while she is gone the infants must not so much as peep lest there come that way a pair of strange green eyes and a ravening mouth. Fear if the first lesson of the kitten, and it is also the stern faith of the grown cat.
Gangs of young street urchins and older boys were a common sight in tenement neighborhoods such as Hell’s Kitchen, pictured here in the early 1900s. Imagine being a cat trying to survive on this street. New York Public Library Digital Collections
When the sprawling legs have got strength and the blue eyes of the kitten are open and staring then only will the gaunt mother cat allow the toddlers to slip through the hole in the basement boarding or out to the shed roof near the nursery nest. The little fellows roll and tumble over one another, bat with their weak paws in mimic warfare, and claw their brothers as they will claw another cat someday when the supremacy of the alley is at stake between two champions.
The mother lolls near the edge of the corner board where she can keep her eye on the approaches, for even in the brief period when the Hell’s Kitchen kitten may play before the serious work of fighting and eating begins there is ever the danger that lurks behind every kitten’s shoulder.
Abe, the pampered cat of the Hotel Lincoln, was born on the very edge of Hell’s Kitchen in 1927. He got lucky when he decided to patiently wait for an opportunity to enter the hotel when the doorman was not looking. It took a while, but his patience paid off. Here he is with his own chamber maid and French chef.
The infant matures quickly in Hell’s Kitchen, whether he be kitten or baby. Babies are left to fight the flies and the dogs on the doorstep of their mother’s house before they can walk. Kittens must soon begin the sharp fight to live. It is quickly and sternly decisive. Either the kitten can skulk better than his fellow, fight better than his fellow when cornered and thus drive his fellow to the gutter and the street sweeper’s can or his life is short.
The lean, sickly looking shadow that slips warily from ashcan to ashcan by night or hides under the fruit vendor’s shelf in the blazing noonday, dashing out for the scrap of meat flung from the butcher’s stall and back again to cover before a brick or a broom can reach it, is the cat that gains wisdom with each pinched day. He knows no code but that of self-preservation. His enemies are legion.
There is a boy who will train him with a baseball bat for sport. There is the bulldog belonging to the colored sport around the corner, whose cat killing record is the boast of his master. The shopkeeper misses a fish and slays the first cat he corners forthwith. The woman who finds her wash streaked with paw marks wields a murderous broom.
How can we expect that the cats of Hell’s Kitchen had good lives, when humans lived in even worse conditions? How can we fully blame the humans for treating cats so poorly when their families were starving, afraid, and miserable, too? MCNY Collections
One fearful lesson the young cat learns early down in Hell’s Kitchen, avoid the road. How many mangled heaps of fur does he see on those two lines of steel where runs the clanging yellow car? A horse cares nothing for a cat; he will step on one rather than shy and get a lashing from his master. The wagons that roll back and forth in a tangle of spokes first terrify and bewilder, then they kill.
The starvelling youngster in draggled fur that lives a day and then another down in Hell’s Kitchen has little choice of foraging. There are the ashcans where scraps of tainted meat may be burrowed for, but if a cat drops into an ashcan his head is below the rim and he cannot see approaching danger.
The ashcan, or ash barrel, was a poor source of food for the Hell’s Kitchen cats. Photo, Jacob Riis, 1888.
Or perhaps there is a trail over fences and sheds up to the back stoop where the housewife keeps her meat in a wire safe; should she by any chance forget to latch the door there is more than a meal there, and the whole joint may be carried off to be devoured at leisure. But beware of the meat that lies temptingly within reach in the back yard; it is probably poisoned.
Of course down by the packing houses on Eleventh Avenue there are meat scraps, bones and bits of hides that may be chewed upon. But then there are the dogs — great starved curs that fight all day long. When they have crept to their holes at night there is little left for the cats and the biggest get the pickings. Then, too, where they clean fish at the markets there are delicious morsels if one can dodge between the legs of the cleaners.
How could a cat safely cross the streets of Old New York? What car, trolley, horse, train, or man would even bother to stop for a lowly feline?
For those that survive the hard months of youth there is one pleasure and one alone. That is the midnight gathering. When all the roaring men and women have gone to their burrows up and down the length of the darkened streets, when the last piano tinkle is stilled and the midnight squad have tramped away from the police station, then come the cats of Hell’s Kitchen to mingle in sweet intercourse.
Out of the dark areaways, hidden alley ends and shadowy lumber yards they come; dodging up the street from shadow to shadow, dashing across lighted spaces like smoky flickerings of an oil light. They slink up the street in the shadows of the tenements to gather in groups of twos and threes and squat with unblinking eyes to yowl into each other’s faces the gossip of the street or to screech sweet nothings of love.
Hell’s Kitchen and the Sebastopol slum (rocks) where many goats made their home before 1890. Perhaps some cats found refuge among the rocks and goats.
Sometimes two of the younger cats will crouch and spring at each other in mock battle or chase a rubber ball that a youngster has lost in the crack of the coping, but their play is done rather shamefacedly and only in halting fits and starts, for a Hell’s Kitchen cat knows that play is not for him.
These three boys, sitting on a fence in Hell’s Kitchen in 1900, look like they probably “played” by making life miserable for the cats of Hell’s Kitchen. But I imagine life was just as hard for these youngsters as it was for cats and kittens. MCNY Collections
Once upon a time, the New York City Post Office employed a feline police squad to protect the mail from rats and mice…
The country’s oldest Brooklyn Navy Yard cat survived a massive explosion on board the USS Maine…
New York City’s first theatrical club hosted a black-tie dinner in honor of its famous feline mascot…
The TWA pilots at the brand-new LaGuardia Airport had a flying feline mascot who won numerous trophies at cat shows…
And a blind cat who wore glasses saved Brooklyn Borough Hall from burning down when he was 27 years old.
Join me this Wednesday, June 3, for a virtual trip back in time to explore New York City’s history via amazing stories about fire cats, police cats, theatrical cats, and other fabulous felines that made the news headlines in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I’ll be sharing about a dozen of my favorite cat-men tales from my book and blog in a 55-minute presentation on ZOOM via the Boonton Public Library.
If you have read The Cat Men of Gotham, this “Happy Hour” event will give you a chance to see some old news photos of the cats that I couldn’t publish in the book (I could only use high-res photos in the book) as well as maps, actual news headlines, and pictures of some cat-men heroes.
Register to Attend
If you are interested in attending, send an email to: registrations@boontonholmeslibrary.org Put “cat stories” in the subject line. You will then get the link and code to use on Wednesday.
If the library does not get back to you for some reason by Wednesday afternoon, send me an email at pgavan@optonline.net and I’ll send you the link to join the ZOOM presentation.
Registration is limited to a set number of people, so please sign up ASAP.
On May 30, 1897, The New York Times and New York Sun reported the following tale of a cat fight that took place in the Battle Row neighborhood on the west side of Manhattan:
The previous night, Patrick W. Gallagher, who lived on the second floor of a brick tenement building at 237 West 60th Street, took his week’s pay home to his wife. Then he went out for whatever reason you choose to imagine. Mrs. Gallagher decided to use some of that money to buy ice cream, so she also left the apartment. The married couple’s actions paved the way for a disastrous cat fight.
The New York Times reported that the two felines involved in the cat fight were black; the New York Sun said one cat was a brindle cat and the other was a nondescript stray. Illustration by Robert Kuhn, 1967
According to The New York Times, a 10-year-old girl named Maggie Callahan was left alone in the apartment with the Gallagher’s two black cats. (The New York Sun tells a slightly different tale; it reports that the family had only 1 brindle cat, and the second cat showed up uninvited via a fire escape).
Maggie took the two cats into the parlor in the front of the apartment and watched as they began to play. She was distracted by children playing outside across the street, so she went to an open window to watch them.
The cats began chasing each other around a table in the center of the room, on which stood a kerosene lamp. One cat jumped up on the table, and you can guess what happened.
The lamp exploded, and the flames began spreading (the Sun says one of the cats caught fire and ran around the room before jumping out a window; the Times says one of the cats was burned, but its injuries were minor).
The cat fight also made the headlines in The New York Times
Anne Keane, Mrs. Gallagher’s mother, heard the cat fight and the explosion from her apartment just above the Gallaghers. She went to investigate, and, finding the door locked, she grabbed a flatiron from who knows where and smashed the lock off the door.
John O’Neil, who lived across the street, saw Maggie at the open window. She was reportedly about the jump out, so he ran up the stairs, into the smoke-filled room, and grabbed the young girl.
These old tenements on West 61st Street were behind the Gallagher’s apartment building at 237 West 60th Street. Save for a few vacant lots, most of the buildings in Battle Row were five-story brick tenements.
As the smoke began filling the hallway, other people among the 16 families who lived in the building began trying to get out. Six men ran outside and turned in a fire alarm. Other men ran through the building to help the women and children get outside.
According to the Sun, Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. McIlvaney, who lived in the back rooms behind the Gallaghers, tried to make it down the stairs at the same time. Both women were “stout and short of breath,” and they ended up getting wedged together on the first-floor landing.
The two women began fighting and pushing at each other, both refusing–or unable–to budge. Finally, the firemen arrived and, “after some difficulty,” they were able to some kind of wedge tool to separate the women.
I have no idea if any firemen were able to get past the women in order to get to the fire, or if the fire continued to burn until the human “blockage” was removed. Either way, as I like to say, you can’t make this stuff up.
The fire caused about $100 worth of damage. Mrs. Gallagher arrived back home with her ice cream just in time to see the firemen getting ready to leave.
One of the cats apparently disappeared; the other cat remained in the room with his back arched and his tail puffed up, apparently ready to get into another fight with the next intruder.
As the Times reported, “The only other damage was to the tempers of Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. McIlvaney.”
West 60th Street and West End Avenue
The Gallaghers lived in a brick tenement house on West 60th Street near West End Avenue; just behind them, Helen Sawtelle lived in a frame shanty house at 234 West 61st Street with dozens of stray cats. Perhaps one of the cats from this story ended up living with Helen.
This cat fight story takes place in what was once a crime-ridden neighborhood called Battle Row, near the old 60th Street Freight Yards and Union Stock Yards. Battle Row had an evil reputation and was a source of great trouble to the police.
Street gangs and young urchins terrorized the neighborhood, and there were numerous fights, assaults, arson fires, and arrests. Living conditions were horrendous, as Jacob A. Riis documented in his photographs of these neighborhoods (there was more than one neighborhood called Battle Row in New York at this time, including one near East 60th Street and First Avenue).
The Battle Row neighborhood on the west side occupied the site of a former 10-acre farm and picnic grounds owned by John and Adelaide Low in the early 1800s. This land was once part of a much larger, 318-acre farm owned by Johannes and Catharine Van Brugh, who had received a patent from Dutch Colonial Governor Richard Nicolls on October 3, 1667 (this is the first record of colonial-era ownership).
Over the years, the land passed through many owners, including Tunis-Cornelissen and Anneke Stille, Stephen DeLancy (a British Loyalist who called the farm Little Bloomingdale), and then John Somarindyck, who purchased the land from Isaac Stoutenburgh and Philip Van Courtlandt, Commissioners of Forfeiture, for $2,500 in 1785.
This 1830 map shows all the lots of the 318-acre John Somarindyck Farm, from 6th Avenue to the Hudson River, between 57th and 69th Streets. The northern boundary of his farm was the hamlet of Harsenville, established by Jacob Harsen in the late 1700s.
John Somarindyck erected a house on Tenth Avenue between 61st and 62nd Street (about 2 blocks from where this cat fight took place). A winding road lead from the house in a southwesterly direction until it met the Bloomingdale Road (Broadway) at present-day 60th Street. In later years, Stephen DeLancy occupied this house, which was near the small hamlet he established (Little Bloomingdale or Bloomingdale Square).
John Somarindyck’s house was located on Tenth Avenue between present-day 61st and 62nd Streets (near red circle ). His barn was on the east side of Tenth Avenue. John Low’s Woods, as they were called by those who picnicked there, lined the North (Hudson) River. (Low’s land west of 11th Avenue was still submerged at this time.) Stephen DeLancey’s hamlet, Bloomingdale Square, is also noted on this 1836 J.H. Colton map.
In 1940, the New York City Housing Authority called the area “the worst slum section in the City of New York” and made plans to demolish all the old tenements. The Amsterdam Housing Projects were built in 1948, replacing three blocks that had collectively housed 1,100 residents. During the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of more tenement residents were displaced as part of the Lincoln Square Renewal Project.
Incidentally, the scenes in the opening 20 minutes of West Side Story were filmed just a few blocks north of this site, among the about-to-be-demolished tenements on West 68th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and West End Avenue. These tenements were also razed as part of the Lincoln Square Renewal Project.
Today, the old John Somarindyck and John Low farm is occupied by the Lincoln Center complex, the Amsterdam Housing tenements, and new luxury condo buildings.
