Posts Tagged ‘Cats of Old New York’

Here’s a tribute to a few “pole-dancing” fire cats that I’ve featured in earlier posts, as well as some snippets of fire-cat stories that will be in my upcoming book on FDNY animal mascots (in other words, this is a tease…)

In 1951, the Brooklyn Dodgers were favored to win the National League race. The 1950 World Champion New York Yankees were expected to come in second place in the American League. That April, the two teams played against each other in a three-game exhibition series. The first game took place at Yankee Stadium on Friday, April 13. A black cat may have brought some good luck to the Dodgers that day…

Tom and his brother cat were born in Gage & Tollner’s restaurant in 1917, when the famous oyster bar and chophouse was on the ground floor of the circa 1875 Craft building at 372-374 Fulton Street. No one knows what happened to his mother and brother, but Tom “apparently recognized his proper sphere in life” and stayed on at Gage & Tollner, where he dined on scallops alongside great icons like Mae West and Jimmy Durante.

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.