Gather 'round boys and girls. Let me tell you a little bit about NYC and beaver. You see, New York City would not be New York City if it weren't for beaver. When the Europeans arrived, everywhere they looked, there was beaver. Beaver here, beaver there, beaver everywhere. And the beaver was so good and so plentiful, they starting sending the beaver back to Europe. (Because good European beaver was getting harder and harder to find). The whole economy of NYC in the 18th and early 19th Centuries essentially revolved around beaver. Great fortunes were made by selling the beaver. Whenever you come across something or some place named after John Jacob Astor, whether it's Astor Place, Astoria, Queens, or the Waldorf-Astoria, you should think about beaver. Because Astor was perhaps the biggest purveyor of beaver of them all. Go to the Astor Place subway station and you will see beautiful homages to beaver.
And for good measure, the official seal of New York City features not one, but TWO beavers. It's a double.
If anything is surprising, it's how short and tucked away "Beaver St" is. Really Broadway is the street that should be called "Beaver St".
Sadly, the beaver within the city was essentially hunted to extinction. But the beaver spirit lives on. Why, on this very block, a place called "Look Good Beauty" was my own personal main source of beaver from like 2012-2016. Maybe not the very highest quality beaver in the land, but still all things considered, pretty decent quality beaver, and dollar for dollar an excellent place to get beaver. Haven't checked out this new beaver shop myself in it's current incarnation, but I have high hopes. Given history and all.