Posts Tagged ‘Cats of Old 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.

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.

One day after Tige, the police cat of the NYPD headquarters building, gave birth to four kittens, a detective recorded their paw prints on official NYPD fingerprint sheets.

A gaunt 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.”

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.

It’s time to celebrate some holiday-time hero cats who saved the lives of their humans and kittens in emergency situations.

Here are just a few stories of hero cats from Brooklyn and New York newspapers published from 1904 to 1932.