Posts Tagged ‘New York City History’

Once upon a time–around 1638–a farmer named Hendrick Harmensen took his cows from New Amsterdam and re-settled on a point of land along the Bowery Bay, where the East River and Flushing Bay meet on the northern tip of what we now call East Elmhurst, Queens. For several years, Harmensen–also known as Henrick the Boor […]

On April 11, 1912, the RMS Carpathia departed from Chelsea Piers in New York City for Fiume (present-day Rijeka, Croatia), carrying about 740 passengers. The ship never reached its destination on this particular departure. Just after midnight on April 15, 1912, Carpathia‘s wireless operator, Harold Cottam, received some messages from Cape Cod stating they had private traffic for the Titanic. […]

People often ask me how I find my stories. Most of my animal tales come from old newspaper articles followed by a lot of research. For this story set in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, there was also a large dose of coincidence. While I was doing research for my last story about the mascot cat of […]

Happy Holidays everyone! I just received some great mews from my publisher, Rutgers University Press. My new book, The Cat Men of Gotham: Tales of Feline Friendships in Old New York, is now available for pre-ordering. The book is not scheduled for release until May, but if you order early, you’ll save $6 on the […]

Although the first National Cat Show at Madison Square Garden II in May 1895 is often cited as the first cat show in America, there were actually quite a few cat shows in New York City and other American cities before this “official cat show” took place at the Garden. During the late 1800s, New York […]