In 1925, a police officer halted traffic as a cat carried her kittens across Lafayette Street in Manhattan. Latter-day analysts have written that this scene was a reenactment staged by a photographer who arrived after the fact.
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Harry Warnecke/NY Daily News Archive, via Getty Images
There was a time when the life of a New York City cat was filled with adventure. The archives of The New York Times reveal a golden era for feline exploits in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when cats were apparently as essential to newspapers as they now are to the internet. Tales (some of them seemingly tall) of the city’s cat population — domesticated, stray and in between — ranged from drama to comedy to tragedy. Here is a small selection.
A Cat Hatches Chicks
Sept. 21, 1879
In 1879, an officer of Brooklyn’s Sanitary Squad received word of a cat at 15th Street and Third Avenue that had hatched three broods of chickens. The officer, “having his curiosity excited, visited the shanty and found pussy seated on the eggs.”
A month before the Brooklyn Bridge opened to the public, a cat crossed from Brooklyn to Manhattan in a political stunt whose purpose remains obscure.
The cat was carried in a basket halfway across the bridge, then walked to the Manhattan side behind its master, who delivered him to members of an outpost of the Tammany Hall political club. There, the cat was called Ned of the Bridge.
“He was presented with a bright new collar bearing his name and the assembled politicians became very merry over the event,” The Times reported.
Cat stories often involved the interruption of some sort of formal event or society setting.
During a rosary procession at what is now St. Paul and St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church, at Congress and Court Streets in Brooklyn, a cat sprang out from under an altar chair, “and landed squarely on the head of Celia Ledger, a sixteen-year-old miss, tearing off her veil,” before being chased off by young boys.
Similarly, in 1904, “an agitated cat came bouncing” into the Marlborough Hotel in Midtown, prompting those in the lobby to jump onto chairs or run out onto Broadway. “Excited Cat Scares Hotel,” read the headline.
There was a whole subgenre of stories about cats taking up residence in church organs.
“An altogether unaccountable tendency on the part of domestic cats to get into organs,” The Times wrote in 1899, “to remain in them regardless of hunger and thirst, to so dispose their bodies as to render futile the combined efforts of organ blower or organist to evoke music from the instrument, appears to have developed in widely separated sections of the country.”
In 1902, just as the organist finished a processional at the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, a mysterious wail went up: “Me-ow-wow-wow-me-ow-e-e!”
“Investigation showed that the old cat had selected the organ as a home for a litter of kittens,” The Times noted.
Animal cruelty, unfortunately, is a permanent feature of the landscape. Cats in olden times were often the butt of mean pranks.
On a ferry from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to 23rd Street in Manhattan, a man who had been out crabbing took an interest in a fellow passenger’s striped feline, a “prize cat” that the owner was taking to his sister in the Bronx.
After convincing the owner to let him hold the cat, the crabber took a crab from his basket and “held it close to one ear of the cat.” The crab grabbed the cat’s ear. The man then attached crabs to the cat’s other ear, its tail, and its sides.
“Then he let the animal go in the women’s cabin,” The Times reported. “One of the wildest scenes ever witnessed on a ferryboat took place.”
The cat survived the ordeal. The crabber was arrested.
A gang of vicious strays led by Wang, “a tailless mauve cat from Formosa,” terrorized the human residents of West 80th Street in Manhattan, yowling all night and pillaging the larders of houses and apartments.
One janitor told The Times that the marauders stole a leg of mutton off his kitchen table.
The Times wrote, citing the janitor’s account, that Wang, “accompanied by a big black cat that had one flaming yellow eye and no ears, stood guard outside the door to prevent him from entering, while the others bore off the leg of mutton to a nearby cellar.”
Sgt. William E. Egan of the police precinct in Morrisania, now the South Bronx, had a steak dinner delivered to him on every shift. On several occasions, steaks went unaccountably missing.
One night, as Sergeant Egan prepared to cut into his porterhouse, he was called away to process an arrest. He heard rattling dishes and turned to see the station cat, Bill, “jump from the table with the precious steak.”
In a more relaxed era of public-health law, it was possible for a cat, a bulldog and a lobster to be around a restaurant at the same time. This led to havoc at Fay’s on West 125th Street.
After a waiter fetched a live lobster from some ice and dropped it, Mattie the restaurant cat jumped at the lobster, which in turn grabbed its tail. Mattie took off, attracting the attention of a customer’s bulldog, Gus.
“The temptation of chasing a cat was stronger than Gus’s table manners,” The Times reported. The combatants were eventually separated. “It may be said that the lobster,” The Times wrote, “received the proper burial.”
In Brownsville, Brooklyn, a woman named Annie Newkirk used her third-floor fire escape as an auxiliary pantry. One day, she hung a young chicken from it. When an old gray cat climbed up to steal the chicken, Ms. Newkirk swung a broom at it.
The cat escaped, but in the process knocked over a box of “canned edibles and turnips and potatoes a la natural.” The groceries smashed the umbrellas of two passers-by and caused scalp wounds.
A robin with a broken wing that fell in the backyard of a house in Mount Vernon, just north of the city, found an unlikely protector in Puffy, the family’s cat.
Bird and cat became close friends. “They nibble at sponge cake together and trail one another about the house,” The Times reported.
Puffy received a medal at an “Animal Hero Day” ceremony at the Hotel Astor in Times Square. “Puffy could afford to look disdainfully at the dog heroes who barked at her,” The Times wrote, “for she rested securely in a heavily barred cage with her robin playfellow.”
