Posts Tagged ‘Cats of Old New York’

Miss Clementine Anderson and Miss Mary J. Anderson were two wealthy, educated, and refined “spinsters” who turned the Poverty Hollow neighborhood around Broome and Pitt Streets on the Lower East Side into a paradise for cats.

“This is a tale of a cat. Of a cat with a tail fourteen inches long. It is a true tale. It is vouched for by a fireman, a policeman and the appearance of the cat. A woman, a basket, a hole in a ceiling, a doctor and some medicine also figure into the tale.”—The New York World, January 5, 1894

Tootsy was the beloved feline firefighter of Engine Company 27 on Franklin Street in Lower Manhattan. Born on the Fourth of July in 1895, Tootsy reportedly loved the smell of smoke as much as she treasured a fresh-caught mouse.

On Saturday, December 11, 1920, employees at the New York General Post Office got a big surprise while opening some mail delivered to the United States from England via the steamship RMS Aquitania. Inside one sealed mail sack was a small male kitten.

On January 8, 1933, Betty, chief mouser of the Lackawanna Terminal at Hoboken, NJ, hitched a train ride on the famous Lackawanna Limited to Dover, N.J. It was her first train trip since joining the crew at Hoboken four or five years earlier.