West Philly Cat Walk draws hundreds or feline revelers

Just after 3 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, a legion of several hundred people set off from Clark Park in West Philly and into the surrounding neighborhood.

They had to go see about some cats.

This was the inaugural West Philly Cat Walk — a guided tour that included stops at the homes of some 50 neighborhood cat owners. And if you had any doubts about whether such an event might draw a crowd, you only needed to look at the horde of cat enthusiasts that filled the area’s streets and sidewalks on Sunday, stretching for several city blocks.

They wore sequined cat ears and tiger-print tops and thrifted cat T-shirts. In some cases, they wore their own cats, in backpack-style carrying cases.

“We just had our eight-year anniversary together,” explained Steph McGady, 28, of West Philly, who had brought along her short-haired cat, Milo, for the occasion. “And I said, ‘Let’s go out. Let’s go crazy.’”

At the head of the group, wearing a T-shirt depicting a sizable tuxedo cat, was Florian Francis, a 30-year-old event planner and the tour’s organizer.

As far as cat resumes go, you could not do much better than Francis. In August, he had hosted the West Philly Cat Fest at Pentridge Station — which had featured, among other things, a cat toy-making station, a cat cafe, a cat trivia competition, and a cat psychic.

The phenomenon of the walking cat tour began in 2017 — when a Minnesota man thought it would be funny to celebrate the cats in a historic Minneapolis neighborhood. It has since spread to various cities, and when Francis learned that Pittsburgh had recently held its own version, he decided it was time West Philly had one of its own.

Fliers went up. Social media posts went out. An interactive online map was created, where cat-owning residents could sign their home up as stops on the tour.

In the days leading up to the event — which generated significant interest on social media — Francis had figured that the turnout would be sizable.

Still, he said, as he led a mob of people from stop to stop on Sunday, “I can’t believe how many people showed up.”

Those who did were treated to no shortage of cats.

Some sat outside on stoops with their cats, allowing visitors to line up for pets and photos. Others presented their cats, Lion King-style, from windows, much to the crowd’s delight.

Some had hung posters with personal information about their cats — birthdays, likes and dislikes, toy preferences.

There was “Whiskey,” whose owner had procured a small cat hat because mosquitoes sometimes liked to bite Whiskey on the ears.

And Huckle, who sat calmly on a porch as an impossibly long line of people — including a baby — waited to pet it. (Someone left a dollar bill on the porch as a tip.)

At one point, a woman in a blue Ford Focus stopped at an intersection and rolled down her window.

“Are you the Cat Walk?” she yelled toward the mass of tour-goers filing through the neighborhood.

The group answered in the affirmative.

“Cooool!” she replied.

It was unclear what the cats themselves made of all this — though, for the most part, they did not seem to mind the attention.

As Bradley, a 10-year-old orange rescue, preened on the front porch of her West Philly home, Audrey Troutt explained: “He’s usually the life of the party.”

Nor was it always entirely apparent whether a cat was part of the tour or had simply stumbled into it by happenstance — a “bonus cat.”

One tortoise-shell cat that appeared suddenly on a sidewalk created a brief stir, as tour-members rushed to pet and photograph it; it was later determined that the cat was merely a curious interloper.

When she’d signed up to be a stop on the tour, Marjorie Friedman, 44, had envisioned a crowd of maybe 20 people, she said. Instead, hundreds packed the street and sidewalk outside her West Philly home Sunday afternoon as her partner’s cat, Dexter, watched curiously from a perch on the front porch.

At one stop, Scammer — a grumpy Calico rescue who sometimes eats soy sauce packets — wasn’t in the window when the group arrived. But across the street, another cat happened to be perched in a windowsill, looking out curiously at the gathered horde.

When someone spotted the cat, it drew raucous cheers.

As the afternoon wore on, the group began to thin. Some broke off from the group to visit the tour’s stops at their own pace. Others called it a day.

But by 5 p.m., as the sun set and a chill descended, the few dozen remaining tour members had not lost their enthusiasm.

At one point, the group arrived at a home on a quiet, leafy street where a pair of cats were said to be inside.

When a cat appeared moments later in the window, it received an enthusiastic ovation.

“What’s his name?” someone shouted.

“Dewey,” said the cat’s owner.

“DEWEY!” the crowd yelled in unison.

And then they were off again, on to the next cat.