Beasts of New York

Afterword & Acknowledgements

Afterword

In 1935, the New York Times reported the discovery of an eight-foot alligator in a manhole on East 123rd Street. In 2001, a five-foot caiman was captured in the Harlem Meer in Central Park. Deer have been seen on Staten Island. Tigers have lived in Harlem high-rises. In October 2007, a seven-foot python was discovered emerging from a Brooklyn toilet. And a coyote was found in Central Park in the summer of 2005.

One could, if so inclined, inspect many of the places Patch visited during his adventures. His drey is on the tree-covered hills near West 83rd Street, the highest point in Central Park. Karmerruk flew him to the overgrown beaches near Fort Tilden. From there, he and Zelina traversed the Cross Bay Bridge to the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Preserve.

After being captured and caged, they escaped from a Brooklyn warehouse near the Pulaski Bridge over Newtown Creek, rode a bus across the Brooklyn Bridge, disembarked in lower Manhattan, and headed north. Patch found Sniffer at the 8th Street/NYU subway station. He and the cats rode the N/R to the 59th Street station, and followed Zelina to Park Avenue, before Patch returned to his home in Central Park. White’s tree is near the park’s southeast corner. The Dungeon is the Central Park Zoo; the Great Sea is the Onassis Reservoir; and the Labyrinth is the Conservatory Garden. The stone spire where Patch meets Coyote for the second time is Cleopatra’s Needle, and the Northern Sea is the Harlem Meer.

As for the Kingdom Beneath, the Amtrak tunnel where Patch speaks to a robin runs up the west side of Manhattan, beneath River-side Park; and the long-disused Croton Aqueduct stretches for miles from Central Park, north across the abandoned High Bridge into the Bronx, and along the Aqueduct Trail in Van Cortlandt Park. It is there, at an abandoned way station that still stands, where the squirrels finally emerged into daylight.

All of these places lie within the five boroughs of magnificent New York City.

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks go to the following: Deborah Schneider, my agent extraordinaire; Chelsea Watt, for the New York City apartment in which I started the book; Elisa Korenne, for the New York City apartment in which I finished the book; Linda Tom, for designing beastsofnewyork.com; Sarah Langan, for exploring the Croton Road with me; Maggie Cino and my sisters, Alison and Jennifer, for reading early versions; Elizabeth Bear, Charles Stross, and David Wellington, for their advice; Simon Law, for his unflagging assistance; Kate Ward, for her support and belief; Julia Solis, for her book New York Underground; L. B. Deyo and David Leibowitz, for their book Invisible Frontier; Temple Grandin, for her book Animals in Translation; Robert Sullivan, for his book Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, for their book Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898;Michelle Walker and Caleigh Minshall, for helping to get the word out; Michael Worek, for turning a pretty good story into a much better one; Chandra Wohleber, for copyediting above and beyond the call of duty; and, especially, thanks to Tim and Elke Inkster, for taking a chance on my weird little squirrel book when no one else would.