Ming, the Bengal Tiger raised in a Harlem apartment, has died

Antoine Yates’ neighbours took notice of the exotic little pet he brought back one day to his Harlem housing project 20 years ago.

“I remember him bringing home this little tiger cub,” Jerome Applewhite, a former neighbour, recalled in an interview on Monday. “When he told me what it was, I knew it was going to grow up to be some big animal.”

Yes, it really was a Bengal tiger cub, and it indeed grew into a 400-pound behemoth mostly during the three years it spent in Apartment 5E of the Drew Hamilton Houses under the loving care of Yates, a cabdriver who was then in his mid-30s.

Yates named him Ming and kept him, as he would later be quoted, “to show the whole world that we could all get along.”

He built a sand pit in Ming’s room and fed him 20 pounds of chicken parts per day — at least until the police, and then the world, found out about the high-rise lair.

Headlines about the tiger — the kind found in the wilds of India or a zoo — in a city apartment came to epitomise New York City at a wilder time when it seemed almost nothing was too crazy to be believed.

Yates was arrested and served a brief stint in jail, while Ming was relocated to an Ohio sanctuary where he lived out a less urban existence until his death from natural causes in February.

Ming’s cremated remains received a homecoming of sorts, as reported Monday in The New York Post. The remains were interred in April at the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery in Westchester County, about 17 miles north of the Harlem apartment where Ming lived a pent-up childhood.

The cemetery honoured Ming with a modest service and a stone monument — “Ming, Tiger of Harlem” — facing south toward New York.

“It just made sense for Ming to rest there,” said Henry Jones, a photographer who shot Ming frequently at the sanctuary in Ohio and helped get the monument made. “He will be visited and honored for future generations.”

Brian Martin, a manager at the cemetery, said in a phone interview, “We’re mostly a cemetery for cats and dogs so we’re excited to have Ming here.”

Not far from Ming’s grave is buried another big cat: Goldfleck, a lion adopted from the circus around 1912 by a Hungarian princess visiting New York City who kept him in her suite at the Plaza Hotel and took him for walks through Central Park.

Ming’s surroundings were less glamorous: an apartment in a housing project where his residency remained an open secret among neighbours who could not ignore the occasional roar or whimpering, or the scent of urine.

Ming was never detected by housing authority officials. Neither was Al, the alligator Yates brought home as a hatchling and raised to nearly 6 feet in a large, fiberglass tank along with Ming (in separate bedrooms, of course).

“To Antoine, he was just a pet,” Applewhite recalled. “Nobody was in danger, not even his family or friends. It was safe in the apartment. He knew what he was doing.”

Yates spoke of some day opening an animal sanctuary, but the unofficial one in his apartment ended in October 2003 after he made a shockingly conventional adoption, of a stray cat.

When Ming tried to pounce on the cat, Yates jumped between them and was gashed by Ming’s fangs. At a nearby emergency room, his claims that the wound was inflicted by a pit bull raised suspicions.

Police officers sent to the apartment heard growling inside and used a remote camera to locate Ming. An officer rappelled dramatically down to the apartment window and used a tranquiliser gun to subdue Ming, who charged ferociously at the window.

It took more than six men to carry the 3-year-old tiger out, and the story became front-page news. The alligator was also taken away.

Yates became known as Tiger Man, and told reporters that Ming was “like my brother, my best friend, my only friend, really.”

Both Ming and Al were sent to sanctuaries in other states. Yates wound up pleading guilty to reckless endangerment. He served three months on Rikers Island.

“It was a story that could only happen in New York City,” said Jeremy Saland, the prosecuting attorney in the case, who recalled that Yates, for a time, also owned a young lion along with Ming.

Saland, now a criminal lawyer in Manhattan, said Yates wanted to create “his own personal Eden” in the apartment.

“He envisioned a harmonious place where man and beast roamed together,” he said.

He said he tried unsuccessfully to get the tiger housed at the Bronx Zoo so Ming could serve as evidence and he joked that if the case had gone to trial, his opening statement would begin with, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, jurors of all ages.’ ”

Yates now lives with his mother, Martha Yates, in a suburb of Philadelphia. Reached on Monday night, she said she never had a problem with her son’s pet.

“He was tame — he was a good pet,” she said. “They got along good together.”

She agreed to take a message for her son — which he did not respond to — but said that he could not come to the phone at the moment.

“He’s out walking the dog,” she said.