Atlas Obscura producer Manolo Morales had a problem before joining one of our Brooklyn Heights tours: he wasn't really a cat person.
That made him a pretty good person to send.
The new episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, “The Cats of Brooklyn,” follows Manolo through Brooklyn Heights on a Cats About Town walking tour, digging into some of the strange, funny and occasionally unbelievable cat stories hiding behind one of New York's oldest neighborhoods.
And there are a lot of them.
A neighborhood full of cat history
Cats About Town grew out of more than a decade of research by historian Peggy Gavan, who has spent years digging through old newspapers, photographs and city records looking for stories about the animals that once shared New York with us.
The podcast gets into exactly the kind of history that made us want to build these tours in the first place.
There is the Brooklyn Bridge Cat Tribe, cats that lived around the bridge and became part of the world surrounding its construction.
There is Commissioner, a cat attached to a Brooklyn Bridge police lieutenant named John J. Lucier. According to a newspaper account, Commissioner disappeared after Lucier retired and later turned up hundreds of miles away at his new home in Utica.
How?
Nobody really knows.
People at the time had theories. Maybe she remembered the route to Grand Central. Maybe she somehow followed his scent. Maybe the whole thing got improved a little in the retelling.
That is part of the fun of working with old newspaper stories. Sometimes history gives you an answer. Sometimes it gives you a very determined cat and lets you decide what you believe.
Henry Ward Beecher gets a cat
The episode also stops at Plymouth Church and the story of Henry Ward Beecher.
Beecher was one of the best-known public figures in 19th-century America, an abolitionist preacher whose Brooklyn church became deeply connected to the anti-slavery movement.
He also wrote about cats.
In 1870, a boy moving from Indiana wrote to Beecher because his family could not take their cat with them. Beecher responded publicly and ultimately took the cat in, naming it Hoosier Cat in honor of Indiana.
It's the kind of small story that can disappear when we talk about famous historical figures. We remember speeches, politics and buildings. We usually do not remember the cat.
We do.
The first king of the Brooklyn Bridge
Then there is Ned.
Before the Brooklyn Bridge officially opened in 1883, a saloon owner named C.W. McAuliffe apparently decided someone should test it.
Someone furry.
A gray cat was brought onto the bridge from the Brooklyn side, released partway across, and encouraged toward Manhattan.
Waiting for him on the other side was a collar.
It read:
Ned, King of the Bridge.
According to the story, Ned then spent the rest of his life living at McAuliffe's saloon.
So yes, before the dignitaries, before the crowds and before generations of New Yorkers began walking across it, a cat had already made the trip.
So, did Atlas Obscura turn Manolo into a cat person?
Not exactly.
By the end of the episode, Manolo admits cats may still intimidate him.
But he also comes away understanding something bigger about why people care about them and why these stories survived.
That is really the point of Cats About Town.
You do not have to arrive knowing anything about cats. You do not even have to consider yourself a cat person.
These tours are about New York.
The cats just happen to be a very good way into it.
Listen to “The Cats of Brooklyn” on The Atlas Obscura Podcast, then come walk the neighborhood and hear the stories they couldn't fit into one episode.
