Posts Tagged ‘New York City History’

From 1900 to 1908, the Dyker Meadow Golf Club had a mascot cat named Lillian Russell who was an expert fishing cat.

“Go up Tenth Avenue and in various cross streets running down to the river are some of the worst blocks in the city; and there are blocks corresponding with them along the East River. The names of some of these places are significant: ‘Battle Row,’ and ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ and ‘Sebastopol.’” — James W. Shepp and […]

Most of the cat-women stories of Old New York were of two genres: outlandish tales of the proverbial “crazy cat lady” who had a dozen or more cats in her house or newsy stories about women who bred cats on a professional basis to sell to wealthy Victorian ladies or to show at the various […]

A tenement house in New York is any building or part thereof which is occupied as the residence of three families or more living independently of each other and doing their own cooking in the premises. It includes apartment houses, flat houses and all other houses of similar character.” –John J. Murphy, Commissioner of the […]

On a late summer day in 1909, during the dog days of August, to be exact, a reporter for the New York Sun noted that there were almost as many cats on Morton Street as there were politicians. I’m not sure if he meant “as there were politicians on Morton Street” or if he meant […]