Emily Warren Roebling was a groundbreaking engineer who took over construction of the Brooklyn Bridge after her husband, who had been leading construction, and son died of decompression sickness. On 24 May 1883, Roebling became the first human to cross the bridge during its opening ceremony. But the first creature to cross the bridge did so about a month earlier, when a cat named Ned claimed the honor.
According to a New York Times article dug up by historian Peggy Gavan, a saloon keeper named CW McAuliffe and the city alderman James J Mooney set up the stunt, searching through Brooklyn strays to find a cat that, as they put it, “was inclined to see the world”. The pair stumbled upon a gray cat they named Ned, who, with the blessing of the bridge’s chief engineer, was placed in a basket and let out on the center of the structure, and walked toward Manhattan.
That’s just one tidbit you’ll learn on Gavan’s new Cats About Town walking tour, a two-hour romp through Brooklyn Heights that covers New York City history from a feline’s perspective. Don’t ask Gavan, a licensed tour guide, about architecture or celebrity sightings – over the course of two miles, she only covers cats, which surprisingly play an important role in the city’s formative years.
Cats have called New York city home for centuries, living as pets or among feral colonies. The tour highlights old-school cat ladies such as Clara V Nungasser Bailey, a widow who moved back in with her parents after the death of her husband in the early 1900s and turned the fourth floor of their townhouse into a cat sanctuary, collecting up to 25 blue-ribbon winners – cats who appeared in proto-Westminster dog show-esque cat competitions with names like Shamrock, Little Miss Muffet, Smokey Topaz and Little Nobody.
A few decades later, in 1940, a Brooklynite named Ann Mudge opened the back yard of her townhouse to alley cats. Mudge managed to talk the owner of the nearby Hotel St George into hosting a cat show celebrating “not only champions but the grocer’s cat and the police station mouser and poor children’s pet”. Fifty felines took part in the inaugural event, which handed out awards to “most heroic”, “funniest”, “oldest” and “ugliest” cats. Prince, a tabby, won a prize for “distinction”, as he protected a nearby church from rodent infestation.
Though homes in Brooklyn Heights now go for millions of dollars, the neighborhood used to be known as “America’s first suburb”. Before any bridges connected Manhattan to Brooklyn, steam ferries brought commuters to and from work.
Truman Capote lived in Brooklyn Heights while writing his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with its cat-owning heroine Holly Golightly, later immortalized as a proto-it-girl by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 film. The action in Desperate Characters, Paula Fox’s 1970 novel on gentrification in Brooklyn Heights, kicks off when an alley cat bites a woman who has opened her window to feed him.
That’s why Gavan, author of The Cat Men of Gotham and The Bravest Pets of Gotham, centers her cat tour in the neighbourhood, covering the mid-19th- to early 20th-century feline history. Gavan co-created the tour with Dan Rimada, who started the popular Instagram account @BodegaCatsofNewYork, a page that chronicles the kitties who live in the city’s corner stores.
“Right now, it’s mostly New Yorkers, not tourists, who take the tour,” Gavan said on a balmy Sunday afternoon from the route’s starting point. “It’s mostly women, though we do get some cat men, too.”
It’s been a big year for cats: after a clip resurfaced of JD Vance railing against “childless cat ladies”, women reclaimed the title on social media – including Taylor Swift, who signed her Instagram endorsement of Kamala Harris as “Childless Cat Lady”.
Longtime downtown New York cool girl Chloë Sevigny came out as anti-dog (not exactly pro-feline, but cat people will take it). Fashion designer Tory Burch added to the discourse, dropping a collection of stories emblazoned with the famous black-and-white photo Cat taken by German portrait photographer Walter Schels.
Gavan’s tour is less interested in contemporary trends but she does end the day with a call to action: she asks that visitors sign her petition to honor Jerry Fox, a “hero cat”, by placing a statue in his honor outside of Borough Hall.
Jerry Fox, she explains, patrolled Brooklyn’s Borough Hall in the early 20th century. A local celebrity, the cat cozied up to police officers, judges and city workers who hung out at his owner’s cafe. When Jerry lost his eyesight in 1903, an optometrist made him a special pair of glasses, a stunt that the New York Times covered, saying the look gave him “a certain quaint dignity”. One day, while making his rounds in Borough Hall, Jerry came upon a fire in an empty room, probably caused by a carelessly flicked cigar. Jerry began howling, alerting some men who were able to put the fire out, averting certain chaos.
Naturally, Gavan imagines the statue depicting Jerry wearing his bespoke glasses.
