Warwick resident's blog featured in Newsweek article

WARWICK — How many people get to be called a favorite New Yorker by a dog?

Albert the Dog, a popular blog, short for weblog, on the World Wide Web, just named Warwick resident Peggy Gavan one of Albert's five Favorite New Yorkers for May.

Gavan was edged out of the number one spot by Henrik Lundquist, an icon of professional hockey fans, but she came in way ahead of Coyotes, which the post describes as New York City's most recent and somewhat unwelcome immigrants.

'The Hatching Cat'
The reason for this honor was that Albert recently learned of Gavan's own blog, The Hatching Cat, True and Unusual Animal Tales of Old New York. That was thanks to a recent and lengthy article about her in Newsweek, the second-largest news weekly magazine in the Unite States, just behind Time Magazine.

In The Hatching Cat, Gavan, a writer and former children's book publishing editor, employees unique stories about animals and their place in the history of New York City to introduce a detailed description along with historic photographs of the City during that period and biographies of the important people in the story.

The blog takes its name from her first story about The French Hatching Cat, an Angora cat from Paris who enjoyed sitting on eggs and was brought to Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey to demonstrate her hatching skills.

There are more than 100 other Hatching Cat stories on line including one about crime-solving goats in the days when there were over 15,000 of them roaming freely throughout East Harlem and another about the amazing high diving Arabian horses at Coney Island in 1899.

Gavan writes full time for a medical firm but spends most evenings crafting her blog.

To help with her research she has a huge collection of New York City historical reference books as well as personal contacts such as Mary Thurston, historian of Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, access to the Museum of the City of New York and other ways to turn up old newspaper articles and other records.

'Very well researched'
The reporter for the Newsweek article, who met with Gavan at Charlotte's Tea Room in the Village of Warwick, told her that they had asked Manhattan Borough Historian Michael Miscione to look at the stories. And, as mentioned in Newsweek, he praised Gavan for tracking down photos and graphics of her subjects.

"My first thought is that it seems to be very well researched," said Miscione. "She obviously has done a lot of work and is very devoted to her topic because there are some really pretty obscure items that she has posted about. Every now and then, you'll turn up a history that mentions a quirky animal story here or there, but to my knowledge this is the first time anybody has really made a compendium of such stories."

Editor's note: Peggy Gavan is the daughter of longtime Warwick Advertiser writer and photographer Roger Gavan.