Animal companions have always been deeply ingrained in New York City’s culture and history, but they were not always treated as family members the way pets are today.
A new exhibition opening Friday at the New-York Historical Society explores the relationships between New Yorkers and their pets and how they have evolved and developed in tandem with the city. On view through April 20, the show, “Pets and the City,” takes visitors through hundreds of years by using art, objects, photographs, documents and memorabilia to weave together a rich tapestry of animal lore.
Roberta J.M. Olson, the show’s curator, was given the challenge of pulling most of the over 300 featured items from the New-York Historical Society’s Museum and Library collections. This exhibition is familiar territory for Olson, as she also curated a show in 2003 with Kathleen Hulser, titled “Petropolis: A Social History of Urban Animal Companions,” about the history of pets in New York City.
That show, Olson said, was very chronological and not immersive. For the new exhibition, she said, she aimed to create an engaging environment and organized the show around themes.
“Many of the themes that we have in here are about compassionate treatment of animals, the bond between animals and humans, or pets and humans, and the sustainability of both,” said Olson, curator of drawings emerita at the museum.
When visitors step in, they are greeted by a newsstand displaying New Yorker magazine covers featuring pets. They will also find themselves surrounded by a site-specific mural by the illustrator Julia Rothman depicting various animals intermingled in a cityscape, including a tiger lounging on an awning, a horse peering out a window and a turtle climbing up a fire escape.
“The idea for it was to make them sort of larger than life and like people almost in the scene,” Rothman said. To capture the animals’ essences, she said, she imagined “if the pets became the people and they occupied everything on the streets, what their personalities would be.”
Before urbanization, New York City was agrarian, and hunting was embedded in the culture. For Indigenous people in the Northeast, such as the Mohawk, animals were kindred spirits, and hunting honored the spiritual connection between human and animal. Symbolic clan animals embodied certain traits that were passed down through the matrilineal line. Featured in the “Proto-Pets: Powerful Animals and the Hunting Culture” section of the exhibition is a document showing how the Mohawk used pictograms of their clan animals as signatures along with their anglicized names recorded by a scribe.
“The deer was one of the most celebrated of all the clan animals and was considered the most powerful animal,” Olson said. “We think, ‘Well, why not a bear or a wolf?’ But the deer was, because it gave of itself.”
In the 18th century, animals began showing up in children’s portraits. These animals were symbolic of the qualities and values that parents hoped to edify in their children. Lambs were featured in girls’ portraits to convey innocence and purity, while deer were used in boys’ portraits to advertise their future stewardship of animals and property. Squirrels were pictured with children because the animal was an emblem of industriousness, and they were also common pets at the time, Olson said.
In the 19th century, people yearned for a connection to the natural world, and pets bridged that gap. Animals started to become integral members of the family, and this trend was seen in family portraits throughout the 1800s. Pets were often featured in the foreground of these paintings, and “Pets in the Family” presents many examples of this.
“Pets began entering the parlor,” Olson said. She added, “It was partly nostalgia for, I think, the lost connection with animals, but it was also part of a general trend toward domestication.”
In “The Peale Family,” a portrait by Charles Willson Peale, Peale’s dog Argus is front and center. The dog’s name is a nod to Odysseus’s faithful hound in Homer’s “Odyssey,” and Argus’s inclusion signifies fidelity in the family.
While some animals were celebrated during this time, others were detested. In this exhibition, “Pests in the City” does not shy away from the harsh realities animals faced in 19th-century New York. As forests evolved into walk-ups, hogs and dogs roamed the city streets eating scraps, and there were about 20,000 pigs in Manhattan in the 1820s. In “American Notes,” Charles Dickens facetiously described the swines as living a “roving, gentlemanly, vagabond kind of life.”
As public safety became a concern and fears of disease grew, hogs were banished to what was then the outskirts of the island, north of 86th Street. When the Department of Sanitation was established in 1881, these natural garbage disposals were eventually replaced.
Stray dogs were also deemed a problem in the 1800s because of rabies and biting. The city offered bounties for catching and killing strays, and then the pound executed mass drownings of dogs in the East River — an area of East 26th Street was known as the “canine bathtub.”
The last drowning was in 1894, when the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals stepped in and began to oversee the care of stray animals. It was founded in 1866 in response to the mistreatment and miserable conditions endured by cart and carriage horses. An illustration of the organization’s founder, Henry Bergh, stopping an exhausted horse from pulling an overcrowded trolley car, is featured here along with other A.S.P.C.A. memorabilia.
New York was the first state to pass an anti-animal cruelty law, and it continued to be a leader in animal rights and regulation. “New York City was basically a hotbed, a crucible, for many of the reform movements,” Olson said.
As New Yorkers have watched the city transform, so have their animal companions. “Pets on the Street” features images of pets and explores how society has adjusted to support their domesticity, including dog walkers and dog runs, canine relief stations and “curb your dog” signs.
Some animals blur the line between pet and co-worker. “Pets at Work: Working Animals and Heroes” celebrates working animals in New York and beyond and examines the relationships between humans and their animal co-workers. This section shares the stories of the World War I heroes Cher Ami, a homing pigeon who delivered a lifesaving message for U.S. troops who were trapped under fire, and Sergeant Stubby, a dog who served with the 102nd Infantry, 26th Yankee Division (he even got an obituary in The New York Times).
It also showcases feline mousers, carriage horses and dogs in a variety of roles such as search and rescue, police units and bomb sniffing. Objects from the Seeing Eye, a guide dog school in Morristown, N.J., are featured as well, including the dogs’ work wear. There is also an image of the organization’s co-founder Morris Frank crossing a busy New York street with his guide dog, Buddy, in 1928.
“All our Seeing Eye dogs receive some training in New York City,” said Craig Garretson, senior communications officer at the Seeing Eye. “We are big believers in the theory that if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”
Both the “Portraits With and of Pets” and “Pets in Pop Culture” sections put humans’ obsession with animals on display. Just like today’s Instagram posts of skateboarding dogs and grumpy cats, people of the past also had a passion for capturing their pets’ likenesses. And animals have been featured in and on movies and television, political ephemera, advertisements, board games and more.
The final theme, “Prized Pets,” brings the past and present together to convey the steadfast connection between humans and their pets. In the concrete jungle, pets connect people to the natural world, and after visiting this exhibition, pet owners may even feel kinship between the stars of the show and their own animal companions at home.
“At this point, they’re all my children,” Olson said of the animals featured. “They’re all my pets.”
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