Rosalie (or Rosalia) Goodman was, depending on your point of view, either a cat hoarder or a cat rescuer in the days when cats were routinely abandoned and abused and when the only forms of population control were castration without anaesthetic or destruction of kittens. For almost a decade, she took in unwanted and injured cats in the neighbourhood bordered by Orchard-street, Hester-street, Clinton-street and East Broadway. She was known locally as “Catty Goodman.”

She was born Rose Waare in Prussia circa 1836 and emigrated to America with her husband, Henry Goodman (probably originally “Gutman”) in the 1850s, where the couple had a four children: Elizabeth, Regina, Hilde, and Oscar. Some newspaper reports claimed she moved to America leaving her husband behind. In 1870, they lived in an apartment at 175 Madison Street. Henry died in 1871 and Rosalie (or Rosalia – an Anglicised spelling based on the German pronunciation of her name) purchased a 17th-century house at 170 Division Street from Moses Bonner. Bonner ran a cigar store there and Henry Goodman had been a cigar maker.

MRS GOODMAN'S HOSPITAL FOR CATS, NEW YORK.
The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, July 31st, 1875

This accompanied a description of the pioneering work of this American cat lover (I have not yet been able to acquire the description).

A HOME FOR INDIGENT CATS. EIGHTY MOUSERS QUARTERED IN AN EAST SIDE TENEMENT.
The New York Sun, 12 February 1875 (back page), extracts were reprinted in numerous US papers on 17th February 1875

A German woman who Takes Care of homeless Cats. Sleeping Rooms Up Stairs and a Promenade in the Back Yard.

With a beaming smile of philanthropy upon her face and surrounded by eighteen cats of all ages, sizes, and nationalities, Mrs.Rosalia Goodman, landlady of 170 Division-street, sat before her shiny black stove in her antique apartment yesterday afternoon, perfectly contented and tidy. Mrs. Goodman is a German woman, and when she came to this country some years ago she left her husband behind. She secured the control of the tenement in Division street and rented the rooms to all classes of tenants, reserving two apartments for herself and her cats. The house is a three-story wooden building, gambrel-roofed and withered with age, and dates back to the Dutch period of the city. The sides and roof have collapsed with the pressure of time, and the clapboards and shingles, mossed and blackened, hang in tatters from the decaying beams and rafters. Inside, the oaken stairs and hall floors are worn into hollows from the use of former generations, and the rooms are low-ceiled, narrow, and dusty, lighted by high, small-paned windows, and still provided with wide, open, old-fashioned fireplaces.

Mrs. Goodman occupies a narrow little apartment in the second story, which she devotes to the double purpose of a home for family and of a day sitting room for her cats. Just above, in the third story is a similar chamber in which her pets are lodged at night Mrs. Goodman derives sufficient income from the rent of her house to enable her to live in comfort and devote the greater part of her time to the relief of indigent catdom and dogdom. No feline sufferer is turned away from the door empty-mouthed, and her warm hearth is the meeting place daily of from twelve to fifty of these animals. Whatever their past history may have been, whether checkered or spotless, no card of admission is required to Mrs. Goodman’s hospitality, but a single cry of distress or a scratch upon the door panels.

Along the halls of the building are scattered tin pans of sawdust, interspersed with dishes of food, and at every landing are low lipped buckets of water to satisfy the wants of Tom and Tabby. As the visitor clambers up the dark cob webbed stair cases, evidences of cats are perceptible on every hand; cats yellow cats black, golden and dingy; cats tawny, white and dubious; cats ringtailed, dovetailed and no tailed; cats with eyes, without eyes, earless, and cats of every description skulk in the black nooks or rush out and disappear in sudden panic. And all the time, from sunrise to sunrise, an aromatic and voluminous cloud of feline exhalation is wafted down the stairs into the street

Mrs. Goodman began four years ago with her good work of reclaiming the abandoned feline denizens of the gutter, the garret, and the cellar, and opening to them the path to a more ennobllng life. She took in at first a “leetle wee kitten,” as she said, a homeless Street Arab, which she nursed and Christianlzed. This small waif of charity, which she named Tiger, was benevolent, like his mistress, and he went over into Essex Street and told ail his indigent friends in that neighborbood of the good fare that could be found at 170 Division Street. He invited them all over, and they accepted and had the first square meal they bad seen in years.

They went back and told their companions; and since that little incident cats of ail classes, the blind, the deaf, the lame, the paralytic, and the humpbacked have been thronging from the vicinity of Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Clinton, Orchard, and Ludlow streets, and East Broadway to Mrs. Goodman’s scrap dish. She has over eighty regular partakers at her board. They sleep by dozens on the floor of the kitchen, they abound in the alleys, hang on the eave troughs and to the window sills, and romp and play tag in the back yard. At night those that are virtuous and happy retire to their beds, which are comfortably fitted up in the third story of the house; while others, that are still given to the dissipation of a fast life, amble along the housetops in the pale moonlight and sing Street ballads.

Mrs. Goodman naturally thinks more of her 80 pets than her neighbors do, who have taken every means to break up the growing monopoly. Lately they called the attention of the Board of Health to the matter, but the officers after an inspection of the promises informed the petitioners that the good German lady bad violated no law by her humanity to the suffering. The neighbors were crest-fallen, while Mrs. Goodman, beaming with triumph, gathered her pets still closer around her. Since then the former have contented themselves with flinging showers of gravel upon the animals in the yard or shying bootjacks and old crockery at them whenever an opportunity is given.

The yard in the rear is the special play-ground of the museum. It is spacious, dirty and abounding in sly nooks that are just the thing for cats. At the back are a half dozen patched wooden buildings similar to the one inhabited by Mrs. Goodman, each with an opening upon the enclosure. To make the place still more retired it is surrounded by a board fence ten feet high.

The One Eyed Yellow

Mrs. Goodman, sitting in the centre of her happy family yesterday, gave in broken English the story of her charitable enterprise. In her lap were three pets, brindled, white and spotted; and on her shoulder contentedly reclined a stalwart, one-eyed yellow-back animal. At her feet, around the hearth were stretched in every variety of attitude a dozen more of every color, whose musical purring kept time to the ticking of an old-fashioned Dutch clock on the mantelpiece. More cats were on the table, on the lounger, and in the chairs, and a shy little animal slept without fear on the top shelf of the closet. A stout German girl washing dishes, a well-dressed young man, and a sick old man with a red cap, on the lounge, completed the family. “My first cat was named Tiger,” said she; “he was a splendid one, and I’d give ten dollars if he were not dead. Till I had him I was always afraid of them, and I took him in because he was such a little wee thing. But somebody took spite against me and locked him in a cellar, and he stayed there till he starved. I found nothing of him but his bones, and I buried him, and then I made up my mind that I’d take care of all the cats I could when people turned them out in the cold to starve. Here is one taking the one-eyed animal from her shoulder, that I found in the gutter with his eye poked out and bleeding, and I took him in and made a respectable cat out of him. He’s the best of the lot now. I don’t love the cats yet, but I pity them, and I think when I’m dead they’ll have no-one to take care of them. Here is another good cat (holding up a plump pearly skinned pet) that I found starving in a cellar, all bones and skin; just look at him now. It’s only people without sense or heart that would turn a helpless animal out in the cold. There ought to be some asylum for such abandoned animals in this country, as there is in England, but there is none, and somebody must look out for them.”

Mrs. Goodman tossed the one-eyed orphan from her shoulder, spilled the other three cats from her lap, and hastened across the room. She took a large iron kettle from the stove and poured a warm boiled dinner upon a piece of oil-cloth, which was speedily surrounded by half a dozen cats, who ate daintily, as though used to good living. The rest of the group slept, or opened a lazy eye to see that nothing was passing that they could afford to miss. Mrs. Goodman moved around her pets like a queen among her subjects. “This cold weather has driven them ail in,” she continued, “and I can’t refuse one of them a good dinner or a place to sleep. I give some of them away, but they are generally badly treated. I gave one to a washer woman in Canal Street some time ago, and when I went round to see how it was getting along, it was nearly frozen and starved, and came running to me with joy. I took it back home again.”

A Shower of Gravel

Just then a tumult arose in the yard, and Mrs. Goodman ran to the back window in time to see a shower of gravel rained from the roof upon a score or more of her cats, that set up yells of terror, and scattered to their hiding places. She held an excited dispute with some young roughs, and when she returned, with an inflamed face, she added: “I suppose I’m a fool, but I won’t allow any one to trouble ’em, and if they do they'll have trouble, that's all.” Mrs. Goodman buys the best cakes, sausages, and beefsteaks she can find in the Bowery for her pets, and spends about $1.50 a day for their food.

Down in the basement, a dozen young men, who were seated around a table in a dusky room playing “huff and gruff” for five cents a clip, expressed unfeigned approval or Mrs. Goodman’s disposition and course. They cited many instances where she had hired a team and driven to pounds to redeem the confiscated dogs of poor people. She has been known to pay freely for such purposes without hope of receiving any return.

“If,” said one young man, “any of her tenants interferes with the rights of her cats, or abuse them, he may expect to leave his room at the earliest date.”

Notes

Rosalie Goodman and her four children occupied two small rooms on the second floor; other rooms were rented out, which allowed Rosalie to support her family and her cats. Her tenants included the cigar dealers on the basement level, an Irish family on the first floor, and a German man in a room on the second floor.

A CAT HOSPITAL.
New York Tribune, August 1877

On Division-street, about midway between Essex and Norfolk streets, in this city, stands a three-story, dilapidated wooden building, that evidently dates back to the Dutch period of the city. The outside appearance of the house is far more inviting than the inside, with its rickety stairs, bare floors and walls, and dirty ceilings. This house is occupied as a tenement house. On the ground floor lives a German Jew, who makes a living by selling cheap cigars. The first floor is occupied by an Irish family. A German has the rooms on the second floor. The third floor is given up to Mrs. Rosalia Goodman, better known by the children in that vicinity as "Catty Goodman," because she devotes much of her time to the comfort and relief of persecuted and neglected cats.

Here a Tribune reporter found Mrs. Goodman, administering to the wants of some 50 cats, of all sizes, ages and conditions. She occupied two rooms, one on each side of the house. The front room is used for eating, cooking and sleeping purposes, while the back room is used for washing and as a playhouse for the feline patients. Mrs. Goodman is a widow, and, with the exception of her cats, lives alone. When the reporter called she held in one hand a puny kitten, with a large bandage over its left eye, while with the other hand she was engaged in stirring some compound in a pot on the stove. Lying in the closets, on the tables, and under the stove, were cats of all descriptions. Some had broken limbs and missing eyes, the result probably of prowling around at night. Others looked as if they had been clipped, being without their fur. Mrs. Goodman receives no pay for her attention to the cats, only the satisfaction which it gives her to attend to the maimed, neglected animals. Her idiosyncrasy is so well known in the neighborhood that whenever a cat is found that is in want of food, or is in any way injured, the unfortunate sufferer is without delay placed in her charge

By the summer of 1878, she was fed up with the intrusive attention and in July 1878, a reporter from “The Daily Graphic” was sent packing: “Now, you get out! I don’t told you but once. I have no more newspaper mens make some moneys out of me. My lawyer say to me no reporter have any right to come in my house, and if so I shall shoot him or push him down stairs or take my broomstick.”

In 1880, Rosalie moved into a new apartment on 19th Street with her four children and her mother, Dore Waare (they are listed on the 1881 census). 170 Division-street was still standing – and inhabited - in April 1897 when it, and neighbouring tenements, were gutted by a fire and the city bought the burnt out buildings from the owners. The tenement buildings in that area were demolished soonafter and the area was redeveloped, leaving no trace of the “cat hospital.”.

The last (by date) account is that appearing in NEW YORK BY SUNLIGHT AND GASLIGHT: A WORK DESCRIPTIVE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN METROPOLIS by James Dabney McCabe, published in 1882

“One of the greatest curiosities in New York is the “Hospital for Cats.” It is located at No. 170 Division Street, in the midst of the tenement-house section of the city, and is conducted by Mrs. Rosalia Goodman, a philanthropic German lady. She devotes the greater part of her time to the comfort and relief of neglected and persecuted felines, and is quite an enthusiast in her singular avocation. The house she occupies is a three-story wooden structure, dating back to the Dutch period of the city. She has lived there for a number of years, and makes a comfortable living”

HOARDER OR EARLY RESCUER?

In the case of Mrs. Goodman we have to consider several factors. She had a huge number of cats and these created a nuisance to her neighbours. However, she lived in an age when spaying was not an option and when castration was performed without anaesthetic, so her cats would have been intact tomcats (which spray) and breeding females. She did rehome some of her cats. She redeemed impounded dogs at her own expense and returned them to their owners who lacked the money to redeem the dogs themselves. Her cats were nursed back to health and apparently well fed by the standards of the day. She lived in a tenement that was already dilapidated, evidently beyond repair because it was later redeveloped. Some rooms were still in a suitable condition to be rented to other tenants, and despite the inconvenience of a large number of cats, several people spoke highly of her work to help those unloved creatures. So was she a hoarder or a rescuer in the days when cats were routinely abandoned of abused? Her cats do not appear to have been neglected or starved, so it’s not a clear-cut case.