THE COP, THE VIRUS, & THE PARROT (1930)
Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes.
The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
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One night in January of 1930, a recent NYPD Academy graduate, Officer Charles Suss, was patrolling his beat at Macon Street and Howard Avenue.
“Six nights he has tramped his frosty beat in the cold hours between midnight and 8 a.m.,” the New York Times reported. “Six nights he has tramped his beat aimlessly, hoping for something to happen.”
But then, as now, rookie cops got the worst time shifts. Also, Macon and Howard, according to the Times, was “a far removed section of Brooklyn” that was “apparently devoid of crimes.
“There was only silence and a little rain.”
But at 5 o’clock on that frosty January morning “Suss and his still brightly varnished stick swung down Howard Avenue.
“The patrolman, as usual, was brooding on crime,” the Times claimed. “He had just decided that the girl he was rescuing would have light hair and blue eyes. In another moment they would be in the Marriage License Bureau at the Municipal Building.”
But then came a “cry from the middle of Saratoga Park.”
“Hello, Jake,” it cried. “Help! Help!”
“Suss and his club streamed into the thin bushes of the park, guided by the racket and the calls for help.
Suss remembered his undergraduate days and what he had been told to do to gunmen. He grabbed his stick more firmly and plowed on. He was doing a neat bit of broken-field running when he suddenly burst into the clearing whence came the noise. There he saw, “instead of a double murder, a parrot running rampant in a two-foot gilt cage.”
“Hello, Jake,” the parrot conversationally announced.
It is rather likely, in addition to his quick deflation at not having discovered a real crime, that Suss was contemplating, at this point, the ceaseless ribbing he was going to be receiving from his fellow cops for his arrest of a bird – a parrot, no less.
But Suss brought his suspect into the Ralph Avenue station, anyhow, where Lieutenant Dolan “happened to think of the ‘parrot disease’” – which was why he had suspected it had been abandoned.
New York, at that time, had been awash in reports of people dying from this parrot disease – known in its scientific term as “psittacosis.”
There seemed good reason for the fear of this disease as a number of Brooklyn residents had recently contracted “the parrot fever,” several of them dying from it.
In fact, the situation had gotten so bad that President Hoover, that year, temporarily barred the importation of parrots into the United States from any country.
It was believed at the time that 25% of cases of psittacosis in humans became fatal. So much was made of this “fever” at the time that it caused the designation of the National Institutes of Health, partially to fund research into the causes of this disease.
So, the following evening, “after the health department cleared the bird of any diseases, the parrot was back in the station cellar.
“It had been put in the Captain’s room – until the Captain appeared – and into the detective’s room – until they arrived. Then it was taken to the cellar, pending becoming a gift to the Park Department.
At which time – “it was still telling Jake all about it.”
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Brownstone Detectives is an historic property research agency. Our mission is to document and save the histories of our clients’ homes. From our research, we produce our celebrated House History Books and House History Reports. Contact us today to begin discovering the history of your home.
