After reading last week's article from Paul Barada, I noted if you go up and look at the lions, it has the inscription J.L. Mott Iron Works, which leads me to believe all the info about the family and how they came to sit at the gym is correct.

However, I think their origin is incorrect. JL Mott Iron Works was out of New York City (reference below).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._L._Mott_Iron_Works.

There is also another link below that will show the history on the lions. After reading it, I thought it would be interesting to call Princeton and see what else they know about the lions. To accompany the
article is a picture of one of the lions as they described at Innis & Pearce entrance. Manley Pearce was also the guy who at one time purchased the lower level of what is now the City Center and his cremated remains were in the wall upstairs for several years.

The link below will show you two lions that look the same that are at the Princeton Art Museum. See the detail they provide.
https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/campus-art/objects/86952?lat=40.3448&lon=-74.6555

Presented to the University by the Class of 1879 on the occasion of their tenth reunion, this pair of bronzed zinc lions flanked the entrance to Nassau Hall for twenty-two years. It was during this period that Princeton unofficially adopted the tiger as its mascot, and in 1911 the lions were replaced with Alexander Phimister Proctor's tigers that still guard Nassau Hall today. Meanwhile, the lions found their new home on the steps of 1879 Hall, where they served as sentinels for more than sixty years, until their deteriorating condition forced the University to put them in storage. They were restored and reinstalled at this location in 2008.

For decades, the lions were misattributed to the French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, the designer of the Statue of Liberty. During their restoration in the 1990s, conservator John Scott correctly identified the works as being produced by the now-defunct J. L. Mott Iron Works, a company that sold through catalogs zinc statuary based on models provided by European sculptors. This particular pair, by the German artist A. Schiffelman, appeared in Mott's 1890 catalogue and was listed for $200.