Much-loved Welcome To Fishtown mural with tabby cats to disappear

The Welcome to Fishtown mural is just so fitting. Three tabby cats are sprawled around the huge letters in a whimsical tease. It’s hip and offbeat, a lot like its neighborhood.

It’s eye-catching, even among the Hollywood set. It took center stage in Jason Segel’s AMC series Dispatches From Elsewhere. Segel and co-star Eve Lindley are filmed standing in front of the felines on Frankford Avenue, just below Girard. It’s featured in Season 5 of Netflix’s Queer Eye, and various commercials.

Within months, it will be no more. Taking its place will be a spanking new apartment building with storefronts on the vacant lot it borders, and many residents say they’ll miss the icon that made them smile.

“I’ll be disappointed to see it go,” said Elizabeth Burdett, who lived in Fishtown for years and now sees the mural every day from a seat on the Route 15 bus when she travels from Port Richmond to Center City for her job in government relations.

“It’s been one of my favorite murals because I have a couple of cats of my own and I just think it’s clever to have cats and Fishtown,” she said. “I think it’s really funny. It’s part of my daily commute. So it’s just something that I see every day and I’ve just always really appreciated it.”

A green tractor sat in the dirt Saturday, in front of the first cat peering around the F in Fishtown. Grading had begun.

Burdett, 28, said she recognizes the need for more housing. “It’s a good thing to have development of the neighborhood. Part of the double-edged sword of being a city of murals is that a lot of them can be a little bit fleeting or temporary in nature. You never really know when one of them is going to be disappearing or be built over.”

Muralist Evan Lovett said it took him and New Jersey artist Jimmy Glossblack two days to paint it in 2017.

“I wanted it to be sort of punny, like if I was a cat I’d want to live in a place called Fishtown,” Lovett told The Inquirer Saturday. “We wanted to give people something to talk to each other about. All the old residents of Fishtown were like, ‘Why is there not a fish in this? It doesn’t make sense,’ and they were grumpy about it. The newer residents were like, ‘This is funny and awesome and we love it.’ And what happened is a conversation started and that is where change happens, when people talk about their differences.”

Lovett, who in 2016 cofounded Visual Urban Renewal and Transformation, a nonprofit that creates murals in urban areas, knew the cats wouldn’t last forever.

“A mural is part of the natural landscape of a city. It’s forever changing. And when I paint a mural, it’s to make a change, but I’m not trying to create a monument. It’s temporary,” he said.

Erica Petrini, a longtime Fishtown resident who works with Lovett, called the mural “Fishtown specific.”

“We have a lot of stray cats hanging about and people take care of them so it’s cute to see them represented in a mural that way. But nothing is permanent. ... It did what it was supposed to do for the amount of time that it was there.”

Jon Geeting, president of the Fishtown Neighbors Association, said while he is sad to see the mural go, he’s happy to see the dirt lot on Frankford Avenue developed, with a 150-unit apartment building with ground-floor commercial space on tap.

“It’s nice to have a sign at the gateway,” he said, “But the lot there was really gross and that’s a really happening part of the corridor. So overall, I’m actually pretty happy to see most of the vacant lots on that section of Frankford getting filled in with buildings.”

Corey Danks, an artist and Fishtown resident for 10 years who lives half a mile from the mural, agreed.

“It’s a bummer. It’s always a bummer when that stuff gets covered up, but it was also an abandoned lot. So it’s kind of weighing one positive against a negative,” said Danks, 31.

But whatever happens, Burdett said, “Fishtown is still going to be Fishtown.”