The Cat Men of Gotham: An Interview With Peggy Gavan
Interviewed by Robb K. Haberman
The Cat Men of Gotham: Tales of Feline Friendships in Old New York
By Peggy Gavan
Rutgers University Press, 2019
274 pages
Today on the Blog, Gotham editor Robb K. Haberman speaks to journalist and editor Peggy Gavan about her book, The Cat Men of Gotham: Tales of Feline Friendship in Old New York.
Gavan discusses the prominent presence and activities of cats in New York City and their interactions with the city’s human residents during a period marked by decades of industrialization, immigration, and urban growth. In telling these stories, Gavan provides unique perspectives on the history of Gotham’s civic, cultural, financial, and social institutions
The core of your book focuses on forty-two profiles of New York City cats during the years 1877 to 1939. You use a wide array of sources — ranging from local periodicals to a journal documenting animal mascots serving aboard US Navy ships — to put these stories together. Please share with us what motivated you to undertake such a project and how you located such a rich trove of source materials covering the cats of Gotham.
The Cat Men of Gotham is based on my website, The Hatching Cat: True and Unusual Animal Tales of Old New York. This site explores the history of New York City via true stories about cats and other animals from the 1800s through World War II.
I started the website in 2013 with a story about a cat that sailed from Paris to New York in 1911 to appear in an amusement park sideshow. The cat love d sitting on eggs and taking care of the chicks when they hatched. I originally intended to write a children’s book about the cat, but as I began digging into the history behind the story, I thought adults would enjoy it more than children would. I also found that writing amazing animal stories was a fun way to learn and share the history of New York. From that point on, my passion for animals and history has taken me on a never-ending quest for discovering and sharing animal tales of Gotham.
Tommy Casanova Lamb is a life member of The Lambs theater club. To this day, his picture hangs in their clubhouse on West 51st Street. Photo courtesy of The Lambs Collection.
Oftentimes, I’ll come across a potential story from one of my readers. For example, I learned about Tommy Casanova Lamb, the mascot cat of the Lambs Club, from Lambs Club Shepherd Marc Baron. Marc sent me a photo of Tommy after reading about another Lambs Club mascot (a goat) on my website. Many hours of research later, including a visit with Marc, I had a great story that is now one of my favorites in the book.
Most of my stories, however, originate as articles in old newspapers. Once I discover a story that piques my interest in the online archives (such as newspapers.com), I take a deeper dive into the history by exploring other resources including census and other government reports, old maps, and electronic books. I also have an extensive personal library with dozens of historical books that I can turn to for further research.
Researching each story can take many hours, but it’s not difficult to find the beginnings of a great tale in the archives. Most old newspapers feature at least one animal-related article (just like today, people loved reading about heroic animal rescues, amazing animal tricks, etc.), so I’ll often come across new story ideas while doing research. For example, it was while doing research on the dog belonging to Civil War General Daniel E. Sickles that I found a small article in The New York Times about a cat that crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 before the bridge had opened to the public. The tiny article was buried in the middle of the paper, but after conducting additional research, I had a great tale to tell my readers.
Cat images and videos have received billions of hits on the internet in recent years. Yet you show that the fascination with felines is a phenomenon that goes back at least 150 years. How do you account for this continued public interest on the topic of cats?
It goes without saying that cats and humans have co-existed for thousands of years. Thus, the fascination with felines goes back at least as far back as the ancient Egyptians, who worshipped cats as semi-divine, and the Vikings, who celebrated the seafaring cats that guarded the provisions on their ships.
Our fascination with cats has never really waned, and I don’t see any end in sight. As media has progressed from hieroglyphics to newspapers, television and the internet, we’re more able to demonstrate our love and fascination. Cats are big business now, and their popularity continues to grow.
Think Grumpy Cat, Keyboard Cat, and Robot Vacuum–Riding Cat, whose videos have made millions of people laugh with joy. And the cat craze isn’t just an online phenomenon. Cat cafes are gaining popularity throughout the world, and cats also continue to be a popular topic for books. There’s no shortage of cozy mystery books starring feline detectives, and these stories have staying power with fans of felines.
A more recent phenomenon is the celebrated cat man. Most cat lovers are familiar with Jackson Galaxy, the host of television’s My Cat from Hell, but social media has also provided a global platform for famous cat men, including comedians Ricky Gervais and Steve Martin, and actors Christopher Walken, George Clooney, and James Franco — just to name a very few.
New York City’s most iconic landmarks — including the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Madison Square Garden, and the Algonquian Hotel — feature prominently in your book. How does your documenting of cat tales provide new perspectives on these historical sites and institutions?
Most historical sources focus on the architecture of the building or landmark itself — in other words, the bones. But there’s so much more to structures than bones. What about its heart and soul?
In 1926, while writing about the Equitable Life Building at 120 Broadway, New York Evening World reporter Victor H. Lawn noted, “Beyond the great pile of stone and steel and concrete . . . lies a romantic story of old New York. The soil is fertile with messages from the past.” The cat tales in my book give life to a building by going beyond the steel and concrete to explore the humans and animals that gave it heart and soul.
Knowing that a cat survived for 16 days in the ice-coated, burned-out shell of the Equitable Building provides an amazing perspective to this history of this iconic building.
The story of the Equitable Life Building, the building that forever changed the city’s zoning laws, is a great example of how my stories provide a unique perspective on history. First constructed in 1870, the Equitable Life Building was lauded as the city’s first skyscraper. Unfortunately, in January 1912, the building was destroyed in a horrific, fatal fire. After the fire, plans were made to replace the building with the largest structure that could fit on the site. The result was a thirty-eight-story building that blocked all sunlight from neighboring streets. In response to this behemoth, comprehensive zoning regulations were put in place, forever changing the city’s skyline.
Although the great fire captured the front pages of newspapers across the country, very few people learned about a tuxedo cat named Kaiser, the building’s long-time resident mouser who survived in the ice-covered ruins of the Equitable Life Building for more than two weeks. Knowing that a cat (and a guinea pig!) survived the fire provides an amazing new perspective when looking at iconic photos of the building during and after the fire.
Although “bodega cats” are a thing of the present, do you think there are analogues from earlier time periods in New York City?
I recently read an article that said bodega cats are symbolic of community. People connect shop cats not just with the local corner store, but with their neighborhood. The same was true in Old New York. Just as every borough today has famous bodega cats, the shops of Gotham also had their share of famous felines that represented neighborhoods and brought communities together. In fact, in those days, almost every shop had at least one resident cat to keep the mice in check. While some of these cats worked strictly behind the scenes, many of them achieved great popularity in their neighborhood. There may not have been any books or websites dedicated to these cats, but the newspapers loved featuring stories about the popular kitties — even shop cat obituaries were the norm in Old New York.
My favorite “bodega cat” from Old New York is Jerry Fox, a blind cat who wore glasses and saved Brooklyn Borough Hall in 1904. Jerry was the shop cat of Terry Fox, who owned a café in the Washington Building at the corner of Court and Joralemon Streets. Although Jerry lived in the café, he spent most of his waking hours patrolling the neighborhood. During his almost twenty-seven years as the feline mayor of Brooklyn (yes, twenty-seven years!), Jerry made hundreds of friends with politicians, trolley motormen, café customers, and all the men constructing the Brooklyn Bridge.
When Jerry passed in 1905, The New York Times reported, “Had each of the several hundred city officeholders, judges, lawyers, volunteer firemen, war veterans, and business men in Borough Hall Square lost an old college chum, there could not have been sorrow more profound than that which greeted the death of Jerry.”
Many of the interactions between human beings and cats that are described in your book occur primarily in workplaces and communal spaces frequented by men. What can you say about the relationships that women had with cats? Did you find any evidence that cats also cultivated a sense of camaraderie and cohesive identity among the women in New York City who belonged to the same sports teams, reform/religious organizations, job sites, political groups, or social clubs?
The stories in my book took place during a time period when strict gender roles and social rules kept most women out of the male-dominated workplaces, sportsmen clubs, and social spaces. The press was also dominated by men. Therefore, the majority of news stories that appeared in the press were based on tales that men shared with other men.
For example, if a cat performed a heroic deed by “arresting” a giant rat at a police station, it was a male police sergeant who would report the story to a male news reporter. Although women may have worked as matrons, nurses, maids, or other support functions at these workplaces and social clubs, only rarely did women make a “cameo appearance” in these news articles. In fact, of the hundreds of cat stories I have shared over the years, only one such story featuring a working woman comes immediately to mind: Mrs. R.R. Fitzgerald (the newspaper didn’t even provide her first name) was a matron at the Essex Market Prison on the Lower East Side. On Thanksgiving Day, 1907, the press reported that Mrs. Fitzgerald fed a large meal to the prison inmates and the prison’s feline mascot, Minnie. The matron reportedly gave Minnie so much chicken and stuffing, the cat had to visit a veterinarian the next day.
That’s not to say women didn’t share the same camaraderie with cats as men did. On the contrary, women formed very close relationships with cats. However, unlike the book Concerning Cats: My Own and Some Others (1900), in which author Helen M. Winslow shares many heartwarming stories about women and their cats, most news articles concerning females and felines were about the proverbial “crazy cat lady.” These articles generally featured three types of women: widowed cat hoarders, such as Rosalie Goodman, who shared her dilapidated frame house on Division Street with about eighty stray cats; upscale cat breeders such as Mrs. Clara N. Bailey, whose prize-winning Angora cats appeared in Broadway shows; and philanthropic women of high society who, like Mrs. Russel Sage, donated their fortunes to cat rescue societies.
Incidentally, one of the most memorable cat stories I’ve discovered is about a group of philanthropic women who called themselves the Midnight Band of Mercy. Although these women rescued and reportedly loved cats, they eventually resorted to murdering hundreds of felines via chloroform in the wee hours of the night. A famous female investigative journalist named Nellie Bly uncovered the horrendous story, which she reported in a series of articles for The New York World in 1893.
The current COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on how New Yorkers spend time with their pets and how they manage the community cat colonies located throughout the five boroughs. How did outbreaks of infectious disease in New York City during the late 19th and early 20th centuries affect relations between cats and humans?
Although I have not studied the relationships between people and pets during the influenza outbreak of 1918, I have done extensive research on the fate of cats and dogs during the city’s polio epidemic of 1916. Unfortunately for the pets of Old New York, humans did not treat them kindly during this outbreak, largely due to ignorance and misinformation.
When polio (then called infantile paralysis) first broke out in Brooklyn in June 1916, there were no accepted theories on how the disease originated or spread. Because the outbreak began in an Italian community, some, including New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Haven Emerson (a great-nephew of Ralph Waldo Emerson), thought the disease had been brought to America by Italian immigrants. Others speculated that it was spread by insects, while some early reports suggested that domestic cats and dogs were to blame. For example, an article in The New York Times published on July 30, 1916, advised people to wash their pet cats and dogs in a two-percent solution of carbolic acid — just in case pets were the cause of infantile paralysis.
The epidemic caused widespread irrational behavior. Many people, wrongly convinced that cats and dogs were responsible for spreading the disease, released their pets to the streets. ASPCA Superintendent Thomas F. Freel tried to convince the public that pets did not spread infantile paralysis, but his words fell on deaf ears. On July 26, the Times reported that the city’s ASPCA was sending up to 450 animals to the lethal gas chambers every day.
Freel told the press, “Since the beginning of the alarm over infantile paralysis, we have been receiving on an average of 800 requests a day for our men to call for unwanted domestic pets, mostly cats, in spite of the statement issued by Health Commissioner Emerson that cats do not carry the germs of the disease.” Freel theorized that more cats were rounded up because of a concurrent downturn in the economy. “When people have to economize,” he explained, “the first thing they decide to do without is the cat and out she goes.” By the end of October, more than 22,000 dogs and almost 270,000 cats had been needlessly killed.
Two years later, when the influenza epidemic struck the United States, people appeared to be more confident with the science of the disease and did not blame their pets for spreading the virus. In fact, some pet parents put masks on their cats and dogs during the epidemic, just as I’m sure they did during the COVID-19 outbreak. (Note: I did not put masks on my three cats, Misha, Jack, and Jeter.)
Peggy Gavan is a journalist, licensed tour guide, volunteer firefighter, and New Yorker who has a passion for cats and New York City history. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and their three rescue cats.
Robb K. Haberman is an associate editor for Gotham. He and his spouse share their apartment with their rescue cat Nessie.