The “Neighbors” section of City Animals addresses a perspective that arose during the early part of the 19th century, when the original forests and meadowlands of Northern New Jersey had not yet been eliminated to make way for buildings and roads. In Hoboken, humans were yet living within the meadows—living side-by-side, in a sense, with birds and beasts native to that environment. The term “neighbors” certainly applies to those residents. But it also refers to a paradoxical perspective held by naturalists living just across the river from Hoboken, in Manhattan: their appreciation of a proximate world of abundant flora and fauna followed their awareness of it imminent destruction.

Manhattan was growing ever more crowded and industrialized, and Hoboken would not remain undeveloped for long. By the close of the century, construction, market hunting, a craze for caging wild songbirds, and the demands of the millinery and fur trades would decimate much of East Coast’s habitat and wildlife.

In the brief period when a burgeoning New York City was so near to undeveloped land, leading naturalists took to crossing the river to explore Hoboken’s meadows and its wildlife. Ironically, these scientists also contributed to the deaths of native fauna. Though they were not as wanton or indiscriminate as the hat trade or trophy-loving hunters, early naturalists lacked the powerful camera lenses and binoculars of contemporary birdwatchers, and commonly killed their subjects to study them.

A few naturalists allowed others to study their specimens, thereby allowing the field of natural history to advance with fewer culls. Notable among them was William Cooper, son of a wealthy English merchant and later, a Hoboken resident. One of the founders of the Lyceum of Natural History (members later established the American Museum of Natural History) Cooper was originally known for his study of “the fossil bones of giant animals,” but he soon developed a reputation for his well-labeled “cabinets”—an assemblage of smaller, extant species, collected from the Northern and Middle States.

Prominent naturalists including John James Audubon, Thomas Nutall, and Prince Charles-Lucien Bonaparte studied Cooper’s specimens. The prince was a son of Napoleon’s younger brother, and was later recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on birds. Outstanding among the newly identified species Bonaparte introduced in his four-volume American Ornithology was a hawk “shot by Mr. Cooper himself in Hudson County, New Jersey.” In fond recognition of Cooper’s identification of a new species, the prince named the hawk after the American naturalist. The migrant “Cooper’s Hawk” (Accipiter cooperii) may still be seen in New Jersey in April and mid-September into November.

During much of the 19th century, the vast majority of dogs and cats, though present in large numbers in New Jersey cities, received only minimal care by their owners. Unless the dogs were used for hunting or fighting, they, and their feline counterparts, simply weren’t considered valuable enough to warrant treatment.

And yet, some city residents were outspoken in their support of domesticated animals—part of a broader vision of a better, more just society. Outstanding among them was Ottilie Assing, a Hoboken-based, radical German journalist who translated Frederick Douglass’s autobiography into German and was his intimate friend for 28 years. “For any kindness done to animals, I feel personally thankful,” Assing remarked to Douglass in an 1878 letter that included her usual commentary on current events and their shared commitment to women’s emancipation and civil rights for African Americans.

Of the 27 surviving letters from Assing to Douglass—she requested her correspondence be burned on her death—most included some reference to animals. The letters reprinted in Radical Passion: Ottilie Assing’s Reports from America and Letters to Frederick Douglass, edited by Christoph Lohmann and published by Peter Lang in 1999, detail her special devotion to a green parrot named Maca and the friends who were “about as great lovers of animals as I am.” Her letters to Douglass often include the salutations “Love to the whole animal company!” or “Love to all our four-legged friends!”

Assing was a strong supporter of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which had been founded in 1866. Her last will and testament established both a trust fund for Frederick Douglass “for the term of his natural life” and provided a large bequest to the ASPCA. The funds, released after her death in 1884, would help secure the organization’s future as the new century approached.

Although a stereotype of contemporary American pet owners has developed in which they are portrayed as indulgent, neurotic, and rich—and, of course, some are—for the better part of the 20th century, Hoboken, at least, has been home to animal caretakers of modest means.

During the 1960s, Paul Kostka, a city policeman, lived in a Garden Street row house with his family, which included a very small bird and a very large dog. (A photograph of Paul’s wife, Mary, and her bird, opens this section of City Animals.) When their Great Dane, Leon, died in 1975, Paul created a memorial in the backyard. A Jersey Journal article later noted that “an ever-burning light” glowed about the urn that held Leo’s cremated remains.

The wish to memorialize his dog, did not, of course, originate with Paul Kostka. (Consider the complicated history of Rex, the bull terrier, depicted in the 1922 photo that provoked my exploration of this topic.) Nor did such tributes end in Hoboken with Kostka’s memorial to Leo.

When Hoboken artist Jennifer Place’s collie, Frank, died in April 2001, she, like Paul Kostka, was a homeowner and had sufficient land around her house to bury her beloved dog. But she, too, needed to do more. Place had walked Frank through many Hoboken neighborhoods during their nine years together, and they had both acquired many friends. To them, she sent memorial cards she designed. And then, for Frank, and for herself, she set about creating a memorial art piece.

The idea for a “quivering stick,” she writes, came from Jim Crace’s 1999 novel Being Dead. The book describes a practice from a century ago that may have been an invention of the author:

The gathering of friends and neighbors around a deceased person to hold a midnight “quivering”—shaking and stomping and rattling sticks to dispel the misdeeds of the departed, leaving the path to heaven unopposed. Participants would then offer fond recollections of the life lived. The artist selected “noisy things, such as Frank’s dog tags,” and favorite objects, to assemble into a kinetic sculpture. Placed added items that reinforced her memories: some of Frank’s fur, his leash, photos taken over the years. “It was my intention,” she later wrote, “to both help his spirit find a good place to rest and to honor his memory with a tangible, visual record.” The resulting object, when shaken, calls to mind the sounds made whenever Frank shook his head in playful anticipation or greeting. In repose, the sculpture also makes Frank’s absence palpable, with his hanging leash waiting for the dog it delighted; it makes tangible, too, the loss of that other one, the one who held the leash, who walked alongside Frank every day.

Pigeons, sparrows, starlings, cockroaches, mice, and rats. They seem to have always been with us. In his 1978 book The Animals Among Us, zoologist John C. McLoughlin calls them “human inquilines”—the “species that have adapted to human habitations and whose lives are, despite all our efforts to the contrary, inextricably tied to our own.”

Some of these animals were originally adored, then reviled. The most extreme example of the pet-to-pests transformation may be the European or “English” sparrow. In the late 19th-century, only two decades after homesick immigrants had released a few of these prolific, city loving birds in Brooklyn, the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched the Great Sparrow War to exterminate them. At first, “they were petted and watched over,” a 1903 ornithology text notes. Special food and quarters were prepared for them for the winter and nesting boxes were installed in areas cleared of predators.

By 1875, English sparrows could be found across America. The particularly enjoyed nesting in cities like Hoboken—urban areas with nest-friendly frame houses and steady supplies of grain in horse droppings, garbage, and poultry feed. Within the next 15 years they would overwhelm public spaces, fouling buildings with their droppings. They were aggressive toward native birds. One naturalist saw several thousand sparrows fighting over a small pool in Central Park.

By 1889, the Department of Agriculture was in high gear, recommending firearms, traps, and feed laced with strychnine and arsenic to exterminate the English sparrow. State bounties paid for dead sparrows and millions were shot. But these methods did not rid U.S. cities of the English sparrow: the introduction of new building materials and the combustion engine did that. Without the nesting areas provided by old wooden buildings, and the grain-rich stables of horses, the population of English sparrows declined.

Strays, too, often met with officially sanctioned violence during the 19th and early 20th centuries, propelled by rabies scares during the summer months. In the late 1850s, strays from Hoboken were caught in New York City’s campaign to exterminate its “mad dogs.” When the Manhattan pound announced a bounty payment of 50 cents for each dog brought to its headquarters, boys took the ferry and trapped Hoboken’s dogs for sale on the return trip. The dogs were drowned in a large tank each evening. In Hoboken, concerns about rabies had prompted passage of an ordinance that permitted anyone “to slay canines running at large, unmuzzled.” Unattended, collarless dogs were often shot right on the street, without any investigation, and persons who “interfered” with the slayer shooting were subject to a $10 fine.

“Mad dog” scares were pushed out of the headlines during the summer of 1916 when a new fear struck East Coast cities: an epidemic form of polio or “infantile paralysis” that was most prevalent among middle-class children.

Some were convinced that stray dogs and cats were carriers. Frightened residents of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania rounded up strays, banned dogs and cats from schoolyards, and washed their pets in a diluted solution of carbolic acid or had them euthanized. The New York Times proclaimed on July 26 that New York City alone had killed 72,000 cats in the “paralysis fear.”

Eventually, experts came forward to refute any connection between polio and stray animals, but they persisted with their belief that poor people—“the great unwashed”—were the likely carriers. Historian Naomi Rogers would later note in her 1992 book Dirt and Disease, Polio Before FDR, that “the irony of the polio story is that health experts targeted just those homes”—the homes of poor, immigrant families—“in which children were likely to already be immune,” as they had been infected, and developed immunity, in infancy.

In the 1850s and 1860s, Manhattan’s “market day” was preceded by a night of cattle- and hog-driving through the streets of Hoboken. Before refrigeration, Western livestock dealers transported live animals, intended for New York’s vast market, via railroad. Their last stop was the Hoboken terminal. Ferries that went unused for human conveyance awaited the animals that survived the multi-state journey, to cross the North River (now called the Hudson.) “I well remember the first night I spent in Hoboken,” a resident later wrote in the Hoboken Observer, recalling his arrival in 1854, when the Pioneer was shuttling herds of cattle. “I was awakened by the bellowing of cattle, the shouts and profanity of the drivers and the crack of their whips, as they passed along Newark Street to the ferries. At the southwest corner of Newark and River Streets was a series of pens, where the animals could be held until such time as they could be taken across the river. The old Pioneer was especially used for that purpose, and it would frequently take till noon before the work was done…As high as 1,800 head of all classes of stock passed on one market day.”

No milk or meat was produced in Hoboken after 1912. But residents continued for the next dozen years or so to raise chickens in backyards and coops, supplementing the family diet with fresh eggs. Live chicken markets, where customers selected birds to be killed and plucked while they waited, prospered throughout the 20th century, with the ethnic background of market owners and customers changing to reflect new waves of arrivals: By the early 1930s, when Italians superseded Germans as Hoboken’s leading foreign-born population, more than half of all poultry markets bore the surnames of Italian owners; forty years later, when persons of Latino heritage comprised forty percent of the city’s population, the markets served a largely Spanish-speaking clientele. Many of the newcomers worked in the city’s garment factories. Following real estate booms in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the displacement or relocation of many working class and poor tenants, Hoboken’s Latino population declined nearly fifty percent. By 2004, one polleria remained in the city.

By the mid-1800s, residents of congested Manhattan were clamoring for outdoor entertainments, and often found them across the river, watching animals perform. Equestrian exhibitions and “sports spectacles” drew thousands to the city’s public spaces.

As a transportation hub with multiple rail lines, regular ferry service, and docking space for two trans-Atlantic steamship companies, Hoboken also hosted circuses and menageries when the traveling companies inaugurated trans-continental tours or prepared for performances in New York. Some, such as Lent’s equestrian company, offered a one-day exhibit in the city before leaving on their “grand excursion by railway.”

Circuses also treated Hoboken residents to amazing late-night displays: animal handlers would unload their exotic charges from rail cars or ships, then exercise them on the city’s main street.

Sometimes circus performers—human or animal—made headlines when the companies’ carefully orchestrated activities went awry, and threats of danger and potential death, always an undercurrent in their shows, became reality. On March 31, 1913, the front pages of the New York Times, Hudson Dispatch, and the Jersey Journal reported the startling death in Hoboken of an elephant from the John Robinson Military Circus.

Five elephants, after performing stunts during a weeklong engagement on 14th Street in New York City, were transported to Hoboken by ferry. It was just before midnight. Third-generation Robinson Circus owner John G. Robinson was working with trainers to bring the elephants to railcars waiting to transport them to their next venue.

Lizzie, the largest of the troop, became alarmed by a train roaring overhead on the elevated line, and broke away from Robinson. She “leaped over a low stone wall into Ferry Street,” one report stated, and, “trumpeting madly,” she began to run down a street crowded with families returning to Hoboken from New York City. As she rushed into the ferry-house, attendants beat her with boat hooks. She pushed through the iron gates to a ferryboat, tied up for the night. “With a mad cry the beast lumbered aboard the boat,” a newsman reported. She “bounded through the wagon cabin” for a moment, then “plunged into the Hudson... For ten minutes she surged in the river, trumpeting violently and slashing the water with her trunk and feet. After a little, however, she emitted one more cry and sank.” Robinson, who had tried with his assistants to pull her in with a strong rope, “sat down on the deck and cried like a baby. He had had Lizzie nearly all the twenty-five years of her life.”

The following day, Lizzie’s body washed ashore at Staten Island. “Rumors were flying around that a vessel had been driven ashore in the storm,” the Staten Island World announced. “Investigation revealed the carcass of an elephant floating around in about thirty feet of water.” By evening, “fully three-thousand people had gathered on the foreshore to view the body,” the Hudson Dispatch reported,” and the police had to be called out to maintain order.”

Lizzie’s body was to be transported to Fire Island for burial, but I could find no record of the internment. John Robinson remained deeply devoted to the remaining elephants in his care. Even after bankruptcy forced him in 1916 to sell most of his equipment and animals to other circuses, he kept four elephants on the Terrace Park, Ohio, property—including his longtime favorite, Tillie, shown right. The Ohio property had always served as their winter quarters.

Between 1865 and 1885, Hoboken’s human population nearly tripled: More than 37,000 people were living within one square mile. Horses had been employed in the draining, filling, and clearing of meadowland for development. Now, as the close of the century neared, still more were needed, as tenements, factories, mills, foundries, and shipyards were constructed, and residents required transport and supplies.

Despite the presence of riding trails and academies in the city, from the mid-19th century until the early part of the 20th-, most horses in Hoboken were “beasts of burden.” A 1909 plat book mapping city land shows the ubiquity of the worker-horse, with an urban grid regularly punctuated by stables, and block-long structures built for companies involved in cartage.

Evidence of the central role of the horse in everyday life appears again and again in period advertising: a coal company displays rows of horses waiting to carry their product to customers; a horse pulling a fine carriage conveys the quality to be found at a fancy First Street florist; the stationery of a Jackson Street funeral director depicts an impressive four-horse hearse.

The perception of the horse as a prized and essential worker would not last much longer. The “horseless carriage” had arrived. By World War II, many Hoboken residents would view the horse as a source of cheap meat.