PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — An upcoming event will help West Philly residents get better acquainted with their neighbors... and their neighbors' cats.
Feline friends will take center stage at the West Philly Cat Walk on Nov. 8. Think of it as a guided tour of the area's housecats.
“Basically people can sign their cats up as tour stops, and how they want to do that is up to them,” explained Florian Francis, the event’s organizer.
"They can make big signs. I've seen people bring their cats out on their porches to kind of say hi to everyone. Then everyone else kind of gathers at a communal point."
The event begins in Clark Park at 3 p.m. and will weave throughout the Baltimore Avenue area of West Philly. Signups are open to get your cat on the map.
“You can sign your cat's name up with your address and then I'll put it on the Google map with a little cat pin. Then we send that map out to everyone to follow along ... and that's what we'll use as our guide to kind of go through each stop on the day of the catwalk,” Francis told KYW Newsradio.
“I know we're going to start at Clark Park and depending on how many stops there are, it might end around Pentridge.”
Francis is no stranger to feline-themed events, having hosted the West Philly Cat Festival in August, at Pentridge Station. That event, they said, went even better than expected.
“We had Purr Cafe there, where you could hang out with kittens. We had our little workshops where you can make cat toys,” they said.
“The one thing that people really love that we always have for our pet stuff is the one pet psychic that we have, Cynthia. People really enjoy going to see her and seeing what she has to say.”
While Francis had long dreamed of organizing an event like this, the impetus to finally do it came more recently.
“In the last year, I think the last few months, I saw that Pittsburgh did their own,” they said, “and so that kind of motivated me to do a Philly one, because I was like, ‘OK, they're popping up everywhere. It seems like something that's really manageable.’”
Francis, however, hasn’t quite settled on whether to include their three cats, Sweet Pea, June Bug and Mr. Noodle, on the tour.
“I thought about it. They're not big on getting in the windows and I'm going to need my partner to be there to help me. So maybe we'll get those big cardboard cutouts of their heads and put them on the windows, and that might be our version of the stop,” they said.
While Francis is focused on making sure the inaugural walk goes off without a hitch, they’re hopeful that this won’t be the last one — and they’re open to expanding it beyond West Philly.
“I would love to [collaborate] with people who are more familiar with the areas [where] people want it. I know someone had mentioned Manayunk,” they said. “I definitely would love to collab with people so I'm not the only one, you know, making decisions.”
