Bodega Cats of New York! -With Dan Rimada

0:00Hello, everyone, and welcome to the New Yorker's podcast, a podcast by New York City Cop. I'm your host, Kelly Copp. I'm a published photographer, New York City tour business owner, content creator, podcaster, and above all else, a New Yorker. Ladies and gentlemen, the next booklet found, Trank is now high. Stand clear of the closing doors, please.

0:36This is the Times Square. This is the Times Square. With me today, everybody, I have Dan Ramada. He is the founder of Bodega Cats of New York, author of the book, and started a campaign to pass the first legislation in New York City surrounding Bodega Cats. But above all else, Dan is a New Yorker. Hey, Dan, welcome to the show. How are you doing today, my friend? Great. Thanks for having me. Awesome. How was the drive from Staten Island today? You know, not too bad. I figured with everything going on in the city right now after the Knicks won, it'd be a little chaotic, but it was actually pretty calm.

1:23The Knicks won last night, hence the Knicks shirt right here. that's right what did you do for the next game i stayed at home with my cats yeah yeah yeah i stayed at home yeah my girlfriend's a dog uh sitter so she yeah overnight sometimes so she was out i had the house to myself order chinese food watch the game nice nice um yeah i was in the west village with all those people that you know and it was fun i had a really good time yeah yeah i wish i was there with you in spirit oh that would have been nice yeah uh why don't you tell us a little bit about your little bit about yourself you know where were you born where you You know, give us some history about you.

1:55Yeah, yeah. So born in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Oh, nice. Spent most of my life in Staten Island. And then I kind of went back and forth. How did you get to Staten Island? I had a friend that lived there. He was looking for a roommate. And he took me in as his roommate. So I spent a couple of years out there. And then I moved back to Fort Greene. And then now I'm back in Staten Island. So I kind of bounced between the two. But being in Brooklyn and being in Fort Greene is really where I got my appreciation for it. And then does your family live in Fort Greene? No, my mom retired, moved to Mexico, bought a ranch.

2:26She's doing great. My dad lives in Florida and Tampa. Wow. Wait, wait, your mom moved to Mexico? Yeah. That's pretty cool. She's Mexican, 100 % Mexican, Spanish lineage. Her blood is as Spaniard as it can get. But she was born and raised in Mexico. So I'm half Mexican, half Italian, Spanish, and Argentinian. So quite the mix. Wow. I should have been a soccer player is what I tell people all the time. So how do you speak? I assume you speak Spanish fluently. Fluently, yeah. I grew up speaking Spanish. Si. Very good. Wow. Very good. And that's the show today, everybody. That's all right. Thanks for having me.

3:04That's awesome. That's very cool. And then your dad's in Tampa. My dad's in Tampa with my sister. She lives in Tampa as well. And she's got three wonderful cats, too. She's got a mom, man, like me. Yeah, yeah. I like that you're bringing the cats up. Yeah, yeah. You know, going to lead into more in the conversation here. Yeah, I love, I love Tampa. I've been there many times. I grew up in, well, I spent a lot of, I spent like 30 years in Orlando. Turned by next door. Yep. So I've driven down I-4 to Tampa many times. How many times have you been to Disney? Well, probably over a thousand. Get out.

3:35Because I worked at Disney. No way. Yeah. So, you know, not, I worked on Disney property. You know, I was a manager at Planet Hollywood. I was a server first and then I became a manager at the Planet Hollywood in Orlando. Whoa. And then, you know, we're on Disney property, so I was there for seven or eight years. Whoa. You know, we got to go to the park for free and everything. It was fun. What a perk. Good times, you know, good old Disney. So you grew up basically in Staten Island, right? Mm-hmm. And what was your neighborhood like? So I grew up in the same neighborhood as the Wu-Tang Clan. Oh, who is that?

4:08Yeah. I was down the block from, like, a lot of the parts of that neighborhood that they rap about in their songs. What part of Staten Island is that? So it's called Park Hill. like geographically where would it be uh actually it's funny almost dead like dead center and then if you go a little bit north of dead center that's pretty much the park hill area there's the park hill projects and broad street which it's not as like greedy as it used to be it's a pretty nice neighborhood now great food out there um but it's i'd love you to show me it i don't know anything about staten island i have a tour business too people probably love to see that i have a tour Yeah.

4:41Yeah. You do? I do. What is your tour business? You know, people know. Cats About Town Tours. Have you heard of it? Oh, yes. Duh. Yeah. The Walking Tour. It's the history of cats. Yeah. Yeah. Well, tell us all about it then. Sure. Yeah. So it's called Cats About Town Tours, and we cover the history. Go ahead. Beautiful segue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that even, yeah, but go ahead. Yeah. So Cats About Town Tours is a, it's a historical walking tour, and it covers the history of cats in New York city around the 1800s, 1900s. We talk about, um, really like famous New York city, like cat institutions.

5:17Um, and it's, uh, my co-founder Peggy Gavin, she's an actual cat historian and she's written books on dogs and cats from the 1800s and 1900s that like contributed to like New York city's, you know, uh, to our, to our culture. Um, there's this one cat that she tells on the tour. We have a tour that we do in Brooklyn Heights and, uh, there was a cat there named jerry fox and jerry fox say cat's name is jerry fox exactly first and last name yeah so he saved brooklyn borough hall from burning down one time yeah there was a judge uh i i think this is right at the beginning of like the 1900s probably like 1901 1902 and uh there was a judge in brooklyn borough hall right on court street in brooklyn heights he was smoking a cigar he had put it down on a stack of papers they caught uh flames or they you know started smoking yeah and i think the judge had like nodded off he had like fallen asleep and jerry fox was in that area he's going up and down the hallways i love that pretty good name yeah yeah and he was an iconic like figure for brooklyn borough hall he was like the resident cat he was like the kind of cat he was a tuxedo cat beautiful tuxedo cat so the black with white here white chest he had some white markings on his face.

6:27There's a photo of him floating around. Very cool. Yeah. And so he caught wind of what was going on. He started smelling the smoke. And somehow he alerted the folks on that floor. He kind of started meowing it regularly and he was acting a bit strange and he was able to get people to notice the smoke billowing out of the judge's office. And they were able to put it out. But without him, that office was full of papers and books and stuff and tons of wood that office wouldn't have went up. And he saved Brooklyn Borough Hall. Might have saved a couple lives as well. So we've got this petition going now to commemorate Jerry Fox with a plaque right on Brooklyn Borough Hall, right on the outside of it.

7:03So, yeah. Wow. You can find out more. Well, let me help if I can. Please. People can, whatever people need to do, too. That'd be awesome. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, it was a really cool story. What year do you know about what years this was? I don't know if you said. Yeah, probably like, I think it's 1901, 1902, right in that area. I was just a kid. Yeah. Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's a fascinating story. so we tell stories like that we stop in front of landmarks Hemingway's house we stop in front of his house and yeah there's a couple cool landmarks I'm taking a tour tomorrow I have no idea about this come on in absolutely I would love to Fideye we do a tour Lower East Side and Brooklyn Heights you know what would be really cool is me to record do like snippets and post you know do a post oh my god I would love that you know what I mean that'd be tremendous I think it's such a cool idea yeah you know I did read a little bit about you know I guess I did read that you had a tour, but for some reason I'm thinking like my brain, like the tours that I do around the city, just your typical, whatever, but I do photos and stuff too.

8:03But, um, gosh. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. That's such a great idea. Tell us, like, can you tell us another story? Yeah. Um, stories I'd love to hear. Sure. So when the, uh, when they had built the, the, the Brooklyn bridge, so right after they completed the Brooklyn bridge, it was a lot of press, a lot of media, um, covering it. And, um, they, they took this cat. The story goes, it was a stray cat uh on the manhattan side and they had taken this cat and they put it directly in the middle of um the brooklyn bridge and they let go of the cat and the cat crossed from the middle to the brooklyn side and he was this cat was the first living being to ever cross the brooklyn bridge before people did it this cat did it and it was just a stunt it was a publicity stunt you know just to like you know snap photos and just make it a a feel-good story but uh yeah it was a cat that crossed the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time, first living being to ever cross the Brooklyn Bridge was actually a cat.

8:56So what I like to say is like, there's, I think that there's like layers. This is fascinating to me. This is such good information. Pretty cool, right? Yeah. We realized that there was no like animal related walking tours in New York City. There was really nothing for cat lovers and dog lovers. And we have like a rich animal history, even like Central Park, the Central Park Zoo. It's been around forever. Great stories out of there as well. Peggy she knows tons of stories she fills me in all the time um but what I always say is like there's there's layers to New York City's history like if you look at Brooklyn Borough Hall it's it's historical in its own right right it doesn't need a cat layer history but it has one if you peel back the layers like there's different types of history there's also animal history there um there's been a lot of like famous New York City cats um even like cats on Broadway we kind of touch on it on our tours as well we kind of mention it can you touch on that too here i don't know the full story just a little then well that'll be a teaser then that'll get people to it's more of like an anecdote than it does anything else like we don't stop in front of like broadway or anything um the closest tour we have is like the lower east side tour but we mentioned how like cats was like you know a really significant part of like new york city's culture like right huge you know the only plays i've never seen yeah i've never seen it either yeah yeah it's a bummer and the cat guy's never seen cat edit that please there goes my credibility Oh, we all do that.

10:11The book tanks. Yeah. But no, we mentioned it. We also mentioned like the two cats in front of the, the Bryant Park New York Public Library. They have names and I forget what their names are. Oh, I do know them. Do you? I do. What is it?

10:27It's Patience. Yes. And Fortitude. Yep. And then I know that Patience is on the left and Fortitude is on the right because Fortitude is on 42nd. Whoa. I did not know that. Yeah. wow four to two i never knew that i would be teaching someone this this little bit of information that's amazing actually on my tours i tell people that i'm like and people are like oh i know that you know but yeah it's interesting that's i wonder if peggy knew that she's yeah i just learned that recently too so i don't want to feel like i'm all this plethora of information i just i just learned it you're adding it to probably within the last year okay cool i learned it today i was today years old i was today how old were you today today years old gosh I mean I just I think you know that you know when I saw your email you know in J2 you know Bodega Cats I mean how can we not have you on to talk about the heart of New York City basically Bodega Cats totally you know so you have a book coming out that's right and so let's talk all about it you know inform our friends about your book and you know information about the bodega cats i have some questions too so yeah yeah let me uh i'll start at the top so yeah uh so so i i should like kind of tease this a little bit i should tell you a little bit about how like we started bodega cats of new york so it was just an instagram account we never expected it to be a project or to be like you know like an archive or anything or a book that was the last thing we were thinking it would ever be um and when i say we it was it was just me like it was i was the first guy like it was just my instagram account and the idea there was i'm i was gonna post photos from your pronouns are we we yes exactly so i was just gonna post photos of my neighborhood like bodega cats in in fort green right off uh like myrtle avenue there was my my cat named luna and she was my neighborhood bodega cat so i started snapping photos of her and i found other bodega cats and this is like right around covid like this is 2020 like peak covid where everything in new york city was shut down but bodegas stayed open right so like shout out to bodega oh yeah heck yeah i agree cats were you know on the clock as well so i i had a chance to like slow down around the clock yeah yeah they had clocked in yeah it's true yeah and um it was the first time to like i think the city had slowed down enough for me to like notice things that i hadn't typically noticed like a bodega cat i had always seen bodega cats my whole life and any new yorker has bodega cat stories but like I never really appreciated them.

12:57I never really looked at them and like. That's such a good point. I know exactly what you mean. You had more time to hang out at the bodegas. I was a busy New Yorker. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And a lot of us like we don't really ever get that chance, you know, but I always I've always thought about like since that moment, bodega cats has like a zen moment for folks. Like no matter how big of a rush you are, if you see a bodega cat, like you're going to stop. You're going to pet that cat. They really came to the forefront during the pandemic, you know. Yeah. But go ahead. I'm sorry. Yeah. No, it's OK.

13:21And so I started the Instagram account selfishly just to post my own photos of my, my own neighborhood cats. I just thought people might want to see my cats. And it stayed that way for about a year. And we started getting like maybe a couple hundred followers and it wasn't a major account or anything. And then, uh, people started sending me photos of their neighborhood bodega cats, to which I was like, no, like this is my project to like start your own account, like whatever. But I had, I had gotten the, uh, bodega cats of New York Instagram account, which is now defunct, unfortunately uh meta shut down that account they said we violated an ad policy we never ran an ad but anyway what legal battle two lawyers lawsuits the whole nine we never heard back from meta so we new york bodega cats is the new instagram account you know what because i was i remember the bodega cat instagram and i earlier when you walked in i was thinking i haven't seen that in a while yeah that's why yeah we had i'm sorry to hear that that sucks that was a blow yeah that was a blow i considered just shutting it down but i was like you know what like my dad gave me good advice and he's like just start it over you did it once like you start the instagram post the photos it was pretty big how many we had 55 000 followers yeah yeah it was a pretty big one yeah yeah it was growing fast yeah it was a blow that was a blow i had one of my pages stolen one time but long story short i somehow i don't know how i got it back but i'm even scared to say that and jinxed it and you know because we both know what it's like to have our you know our pride and joy pages taken away that we worked so hard on yeah so people it's just tough but go ahead i'm sorry but you know what else like that that instagram account we had 1300 and some change uh 100 photos and that was like an archive in and of itself that was like an archive of user you know follower submitted photos that existed on our instagram account and that was wiped out so we that really hurt you know like that was the heart of our of our of our brand it's the people's cat exactly you Exactly.

15:13It was a massive contribution. That people are so proud of and then sadly... Taken away on you. Yeah. Because AI had picked up on our account and they said that we violated an ad policy, which we didn't run ads. So, yeah. Long story short, we never got the account back. I don't think we will. So we started up a new one and it's doing okay right now, thankfully. Yeah, so people started sending over photos of their neighborhood bodega cats, to which I resisted. I was kind of selfish about it. And then little by little, I started to realize this is no longer my thing. this has become kind of like a like a cultural Instagram account so I started accepting photos and I was reposting pictures that people were sending me and um from there it just grew into a pretty big account and um so that that's what it was initially and we've kind of like evolved from there we've kind of grown uh we have a book coming out like you mentioned yeah it's a hardcover book 240 pages we cover 60 cats that's that's a big book good for you yeah nine by eleven I think it is and it's from quarto publishing who's done a lot of really great coffee table books in the past and uh i'm not a photographer i'm good with my iphone but i am so yeah perfect next book next yeah but i get cats too that's right yeah the sequel um so uh i i worked with gulci uh kilkis she runs um uh turkish street cats which is her instagram yeah it's a fantastic i love i know exactly what you're talking about yeah she's so great and i didn't realize turkey had like crazy amount of cats everywhere have you been there too i've not it's on the list it's like it's a huge part of their culture huge everywhere and they're well cared for people take care of them they get fed all the time they get pets all the time yeah yeah it's it's massive over there japan too japan love really yeah huge my friends who are from turkey you know that live in new york city here and um were some business friends of mine and we had a long conversation about all the cats in turkey which i had no clue about and i was online forever all night that night watching all the turkey cats yeah yeah the turkey cat the turkey cats that sounded weird that's a meme that's gonna be a meme turkey cats okay but go ahead but yeah so i i had been following gold chase um instagram account for for a long time and i loved her style i love how she would capture like the cat's expressions and stuff and nothing was ever staged with culture like even when we were shooting for the book it was always really important for us to not stage anything like she always told me um she's like just like be like a fly on the wall like just like blend into like the wall you know like just be there i'll snap the right phone like yeah literally i was up against like the chip rack i was like this yeah um but she was great uh she was great to work with i picked the right photographer for this for this first book for this first project that's nice when it's a good fit totally oh my god it's so great and she was so organized she like had the logistics down like we would be visiting 15 bodega cats in one day and she would have like the google maps like she would have all the cats we have like walking routes she was so efficient That's a lot of bodegas in one day.

18:01We visited a little over 250 bodegas to capture 60 cats. That made it to the book. Yeah. Wow. Because not every bodega has a cat. Right. Sometimes they run off. Sometimes they're stolen. Sometimes they pass away. So we have this running, it's like an Excel sheet with color coded, like, was there a cat there? Was there a cat there? But we settled on the final 60 cats, the cats that we really thought told an interesting story. So it's a photography book, first and foremost. And then we tell the story of that cat. Something that I realized was like, people weren't writing down these cat stories and they weren't writing down their names.

18:35And, you know, these cats, they play an important role, right? They're an institution in New York City and in our culture. So I figured, you know, like we should pay homage to them. We should write down their names and ask the owner about their story and really pay attention. Speaking of, can you tell us your, well, I don't want to say your favorite because they're all your favorites in the book. Yeah, yeah. can you tell us some some of the stories of a few cats oh man yeah um there's three stories that i that i love telling so perfect yeah i'll say um the first one is jimmy he's on jimmy's the cat's name jimmy's the cat's name yeah yeah and uh it's funny we ran into jimmy um by mistake so gold train and i we were we were going down i think he's on second avenue going down second avenue manhattan and uh we we were like we kind of had our heads in a swivel we were like peek peeking inside bodegas like on the way to the next bodega cat but we kept like looking inside of them and stuff and i'll tell you in a second how you can spot a bodega cat i've come up with a bit of a system for people who want to come up uh to come to new york and then find bodega cats i'll tell you what to look for um i wrote a blog about it and uh i think it's i can't wait it's pretty good guide yeah so we were on our way to a different cat and then um on the left we saw a little orange tabby cat poking its head out of the door and we're like oh man there's there's a cat right here so we went up to the cat we started petting it Golgi started snapping photos and then I walked in and it was always like the same kind of speech like I walk up to the bodega owner and say hey you know I'm Dan I have an Instagram account right now we're shooting for a book about bodega cats we spotted your cat would love to ask you a couple questions so while I'm talking to the owner of the bodega Golgi is snapping away and I'm trying to explain the project and you know you you can imagine like bodega owners are typically like arabic speaking or spanish speaking so like my spanish came in handy sometimes except for like dominican puerto rican spanish a little bit different than like the spanish that i grew up speaking you know but we we got by with it it was uh it was not too bad with spanish speakers but uh arabic owners who like i had to explain the project and explain this paper release that you have to sign so that I could take photos on your property, you know, and get permission to like snap photos in your private, you know, business.

20:50But anyway, so we stopped. We saw Jimmy in the doorway. We walked in, we started talking to the owner and he told us like fantastic stories. And he was telling us that Jimmy nets the store about$400 in additional sales per day. So Jimmy leads to people like me and Golgi. He's like the number one sales cat. Yeah, seriously, seriously. And the owner there was also telling me stories about like how, how like he learned a lot from the cat in, in selling in general, what sales is like. And he said that like the number one thing that he learned was like, first thing you have to do is go to the people.

21:23So that's Jimmy in the doorway. You have to go to the people, get, get the attention. And then after a while they'll start to come to you. And that's kind of what happened with Jimmy. Jimmy's become like a local celebrity, right? You know, you don't have to spot him in the doorway anymore. You, you hear about Jimmy on social media and you go and visit him and then you might buy something. You might buy some chips or a soda or something. So, so, uh, That's the story of Jimmy. He's an orange tabby cat. He's in the book. We tell his full story there. I had an orange tabby cat, so a little affinity towards Jimmy right now.

21:49I grew up with three of them, yeah. Love, yeah. I was named after a cat. Yeah. So Danny was our childhood cat. It was like a fluffy orange tabby cat, long hair. Yeah. And I was named after that cat. My parents didn't tell me until way later on because they didn't think I could handle it as a kid. And then here you are years later. Yeah, I got a cat business. I think that's like foreshadowing or whatever. There's something that happened there. They set me up properly. That's pretty, that's pretty awesome. So there's, there's Jimmy. It's a great story. Then there's, I'll tell you the story of Zorro, who kind of earned his reputation.

22:18So Zorro is on Avenue A in Manhattan as well. And Lower East Village, Lower East Side. Lower East Side, I guess. Let's get those two confused, which is which, what leads into what? Sure. Where's the border? Yeah, yeah. What's still relevant to the podcast right now? What? We'll discuss it afterwards. For sure. We'll get a map out. All right, good. Go ahead. Yeah, do an overlay of a map. Yeah. um so so then there's there's zorro who really earned his name so um the owner there it's inside of a um it's like a mexican restaurant slash bodega and uh so they said what neighborhood is this in this is in a lower east side oh you said that yeah that's okay yeah on avenue yeah yeah and um yeah you're it's okay happy to repeat um so um the owner there ruben he was telling us uh so we walked in we explained the project and i was like do you have any like interesting stories about zorro and the first one that came to mind almost immediately was there was a health inspector he walked in clipboard pen you know the lanyard he walks in from from the city and uh he's there to do the health inspection which ruben has gone through a million times and um so he was he was there to do the inspection and everything passed everything was okay thank god he saw the cat couldn't care less about the cat you don't always get a summons for having a cat depends on the health inspector having a bad day you know exactly i was just gonna say yeah yeah it depends on their mood so luckily this guy was in a good mood and i think he left in a pretty bad mood so here's the story oh boy so he walks in he doesn't he does the inspection and everything passes everything's fine you know a a letter grade for for the window there and he notices the cat couldn't care less about the cat and there's a little spot on the radiator so when you walk into this bodega on the right side there's like one of those metal you know iconic radiators and on top of it is like a cardboard box that Zorro likes to post up in.

24:07The radiator's nice and hot and he posts up. Yep, understandable. And so he walks in, the inspector's done with the inspection, he gives Ruben the paperwork and he reaches for the door to walk out and Zorro reaches his claw out and scratches the health inspector, elbow to wrist, and he leaves a nice mark on his arm. And Ruben kind of gives him a shoulder shrug, you know, one of these. He's a New Yorker. He's a cat, what can I do? and then um you know i i think the health inspector kind of gave him a like you know come on man like one of those you know really really like with this cat uh doesn't change the letter grade doesn't give him a summons walks out zorro's reputation is intact right his name is now like wow his name yeah that could have really i couldn't want the other way turn for the worse for sure you know i was gonna ask you too um i had a question specifically asking about health inspectors and the cats i mean how that's a big deal it could be a big deal and in this case it wasn't but if a food if a house inspector is in a bad mood or just isn't happy and looking for things i mean yeah i assume the cat would be you know they don't like take the cat or anything but you can get a nasty summons yeah um so they go up to about fifteen hundred dollars for the defenses they started about two or three hundred bucks and and repeat offenses it becomes pretty costly but something that I always like mention is that I think that these owners have done the math and they figured out that like having a bodega cat and sometimes getting a fine is a lot cheaper than hiring exterminators, then you have poison all over the place.

25:41I was just going to say that. Yeah. You know, I was just going to say like, you know, as I think a health inspector would think, well, at least this, the bodega cat has a benefit because it eliminates mats, mats, rats and mice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I just like to make it faster talk yeah good move good move yeah it's because they you know when this airs you know the the the finals were last night we won you know the next one so i'm just a little sure scatterbrained yeah exactly yeah so uh but but um yeah i would think that would be a benefit to you to a health inspector you know oh this actually helps keep the the bodega safer and cleaner and more hygienic in a sense it does whatever it is you know what i mean it very much does yeah it's it's that but they lay on the bread and stuff and things like that they do they make your bread a little like caved in you know they've yeah in my experience they've moved on to the doritos and yeah yeah exactly they're there they're you know but yeah you gotta know where to look yeah so i assume the health inspectors have no issue with that then too you know yeah you know where it's a bigger deal is like bodegas that serve food that that's where it's a big yeah because they you know they have four you know food product out which which makes sense i mean i think New Yorkers would agree, we don't want a cat laying on top of our lettuce and tomatoes and stuff.

26:56Correct. Typically, they don't. A lot of times, they do stay out of the food stations. Yeah, I've never seen one. It's always in the bread area, the Doritos. On the shelves. Yeah, on top of the ATMs. Exactly. Where it's warm. The thing I didn't know going into this project was that bodega cats are illegal, technically, under city health code. Oh, I didn't. Yeah, I guess it does make sense. it does yeah so like it basically says you can't have any live animal except for a service animal can't have anything a goldfish cat can't have any any type of animal um and then if you do there's you know uh a summons but it's it's one of these weird new york catch 22s where you have to decide between paying for an exterminator having a bunch of dead rats in your walls right or you hire a bodega cat right you get a bodega cat exactly you know it's the riffraff out exactly you know so So I wonder if they have kitty litter boxes in the bodegas.

27:52Cat litter boxes? Yeah. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. We just worked with a company called LeShore, and they asked us about the legislation. It's a brand. They sell these pretty viral cat beds. But they asked us, they sent us an email, and they were like, hey, we saw the legislation. How can we get involved? How can we help out today? And I was like, you know, I'm not really sure. And then they pitched me this idea of donating cat litter boxes, like robot ones that clean themselves. Yeah, exactly. but they pitched me this idea of like donating you know a bunch and i said hey could you donate 10 of these like litter boxes to like bodega cats and they did there was a really cool little campaign so 10 bodega cats got like new cat beds alum these robot like litter boxes that can clean themselves which for a bodega owner like it's pretty helpful and i have to scoop cat litter but um yeah i mean they have litter boxes they have a place to sleep um one thing i will say is like not every bodega cat is treated equally like there's definitely abuse that happens and uh it's it's terrible and like gulchry and i have seen some like sketchy situations you know but uh we work with a lot of cat rescues and we'll get them involved if we see something like truly horrific like we'll get them involved and yeah when they close the bodegas we'll say 2 3 a.m sometimes the cats just live there i guess some do some do there's one cat um actually i think the same with zorro but there's a cat named tiger on metropolitan avenue in williamsburg and uh the owner there told me that he takes Tiger home every single night.

29:15Yeah. He takes him home. He's like his pet. Yeah. I love that. There's another cat in the West village named Papa, who's a beautiful ragdoll cat. And same thing. Actually, the owner there told me that he bought Papa this bodega cat or this, it wasn't a bodega cat at the time. He bought this cat for his girlfriend and his girlfriend ended up breaking up with him before he gave her the cat. And he had just like bought a bodega. So he's like, well, now this is my cat. This is my bodega cat. So there, you know, there's, stories like that but um you know on the other side like there's there are like basement breeders that will breed cats for bodegas which is a true shame i never even heard of this yeah it does happen it happens a lot and the the unsung heroes and all of this stuff is definitely the cat rescues like before the legislation that i know we'll talk about but like right before the legislation and before the state and the city bill there was cat rescues and there still are cat rescues literally like doing the best work possible for bodega cats they're spaying them they're neutering them the money comes out of their pockets a lot of times sometimes the city will reimburse but not always but um yeah they're the unsung heroes of all of this they've been looking after bodega cats since the beginning this is fascinating i'm so glad you're talking to us on the podcast yeah me too really really having me do you remember um the cat that was stolen it was around the pandemic or after the pandemic it was all over the news snowy i don't remember the name i think it was in brooklyn could have been bokeh maybe both where bokeh not bokeh raton yeah i know what you mean yeah b-o-k-a yeah he he made it to the papers like that was a really literally stolen picked off picked up off the sidewalk or something exactly do you remember the stories i do yeah there's a few stories like that yeah tell us remind me and tell everybody yeah there was a cat named bokeh i i mean the whole city was just oh it was an odd and people were really upset about that go ahead sorry yeah but you know like that's that's i think that the way i've come to know bodega cats is like they've become these kind of community anchors where like people in the community they know their local bodega cat and boca and snowy who i'll talk about too like these were two really well-known cats in their neighborhoods so when like these cats go missing or when they get stolen you know like the neighborhood reacts and and that has a ripple effect totally yeah totally yeah it rippled out to the whole city but boca luckily boca was returned um it was a i think a few weeks that they didn't have the cat the owner was heartbroken every day at the news you know the updates and everything yeah go ahead yeah that was that was a rough one um and then the cat was luckily returned there's this really iconic photo of the bodega owner on his knees welcoming the cat yeah that's probably who you're thinking of yeah that became uh that became a really big deal but luckily was returned that cat is now retired uh they have an instagram account in bokeh yeah yeah up and moved yeah actually it's a bokeh raton which is rat's mouth in spanish so wow how fitting yeah full circle for bokeh um so and then snowy was another one snowy also got stolen and um i think it was i think this was like an innocent thing i think that they saw the cat outside didn't realize it was a bodega cat picked it up and it was a persian cat i believe so it was not like your typical tabby that you would see in a bodega anyway so so they took it home but they had surveillance of the guy picking up the the cat and taking it and um i think it was the guy's friend had reached out to the bodega owner to be like hey my friend took it it was a mistake please don't kill this guy because you don't mess with cats in new york city so he had to have like an intermediary like kind of negotiate the peace a bit they brought back the cat but uh on a sour note a few weeks after snobby was returned it had left the bodega and it was hit by a car yeah it was hit by a car and a cat passed but there's a beautiful memorial inside of that bodega but uh when the when snowbeer was returned it was like a block party it was it was pretty cool it was all over the news and stuff yeah yeah i mean it's a big deal someone steals a cat or a cat's missing the whole city gets involved all five boroughs are on it the sleuths come out yeah yeah everybody's everybody's gathering together and we're we're finding this cat for sure yeah it's been it's sad that the cats are taken but you know are brought back most of the time you know and it's just beautiful to see uh everybody's just unified you know getting this this sweet little cat back i i heard this story about um there's a cat in hell's kitchen um her name is uh blanca her name's blanca and uh so it's a bodega in the front and then once you hit the corner there's like a flower shop kind of like a wall of flowers you could purchase and a lot of like these bodegas have these like flower connections but uh that's so true you know what i mean they always have a flower yeah yeah so um and that's where blanca likes to hang out so she's in hell's kitchen i forget exactly where but um when when blanca when she's not seen for a few days the the neighborhood of hell's kitchen like there's a group chat about blanca so when she's not seen for a few days people start to check in with each other my friend jenny was telling me this story that she lives in hell's kitchen she was telling me the story about like blanca and and really funny side note about blanca uh she has been spotted on Google Street View three years in a row.

34:17Yeah. You see her on the corner. There's one shot of like an old guy, like bending over, petting Blanca. By the old guy? Yeah. Oh my God. Wow. Good. But yeah, so three years in a row, she got caught on Google Street View. We have a blog about it and we have like the screenshots of Google Street View catching her three years in a row on the side, almost in the same spot. That's pretty awesome. Yeah, pretty cool. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, that bad. Back real quick, side note. Yeah. The flower thing. I've never verbally talked about it, in a sense, if that's the right thing to say, if that's the right phrase.

34:44but I um I've thought about those flower shops subconsciously like I wonder how that they're connected to the bodegas that's so funny because they're always a bodega and then on the outside sometimes there's yeah like all around the world how do they you know yeah it's you know a good little side hustle yeah yeah I wonder how that works that's funny yeah bodega in the front party in the back a flower that's hilarious that is hilarious well awesome these are so many awesome stories like we could talk all day yeah um so let's get to the legislation yeah that you're doing. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, so I'll, I'll kind of give you the, the brief history.

35:16So, uh, 2025, January, we launched a petition on change.org. Uh, and, and it wasn't to legalize bodega cats. The idea here was I had spoken to a few cat rescues and they had told me that like they, they get very few resources, um, from, from the city and, you know, donations and like fundraisers is kind of difficult for them. It's usually pretty small organizations. So I, I started a petition just as a hope and a prayer to, um, to get the city to provide resources, maybe reallocate some funding from the rat czar under Adams, uh, reallocate some of the money that they allocated there, allocate that to like spaying and neutering programs for bodega cats.

35:53And so I started the petition and it got some traction. It probably hit about a thousand signatures. People started talking about it. And then, um, Alexandra Silver from the mayor's office of animal welfare. She was the director. She reached out, uh, she sent me an email. and she goes, hey, Dan, like we saw your petition. It's starting to get some traction. We just want to talk to you a little bit about what you're asking for. And I said, okay, great. Innocent conversation. Let's do it. We jump on the phone and she tells me like, look, in short, she basically says, look, I think that your heart's in the right place.

36:24It seems like you mean well with this petition. And I want you to know that like the city loves Bodega Cats too. And we want to be able to provide resources, but we can't because they're illegal under health code. We cannot allocate money to something that's not supposed to be there um all these cats are technically illegal they shouldn't be there in the first place so um so alexandra silver says like we're not able to provide these this type of resource to these types of cats because they're illegal so then i had this like moonshot light bulb idea where i got off the call and i was kind of defeated and i was like well i should just delete the petition and then i said why don't i just try to legalize bodega cats right how hard could that yeah that's easy enough right you're about to tell us how hard it might be i'll tell you so i i it took a few days and i i changed the title to um something along the lines of like legalized bodega cats in new york city yeah and and the reasoning there by the way like the reason i i even want bodega cats to be legalized is like number one there's a lot of uncertainty for these bodega owners like they they don't know if they're going to get a summon sometimes they do sometimes they don't but it's an effective form of road control so that's that's number one and number two like Like these cats, they exist in this legal gray zone where like they're not supposed to be there, but they're there anyway.

37:38Right. And a lot of times these cats are like hidden. They're not exactly like there's not a bright light being shined on them. They exist in this kind of gray area where the city and the state, they cannot provide protections for something that's illegal. The first step was I have to legalize bodega cats. So I started the petition or I restarted the petition and then it just took off from there. We got calls from NPR, the New York Times. Good for you. We just did an interview with a Japanese media company. So dozens of like major publications, they were all over the story. And then now it's at 14, almost 15 ,000 signatures.

38:13And we have a bill now in the city and in the state. So Keith Powers, his office reached out to us after the petition kind of caught on. And he said, hey, look, we saw your petition. I love it. I want to make it happen. Tell me what you think. So we worked on the bill's language a little bit. I told them like what I'm hearing, what these cats really need. And what we settled on was let's eliminate the fines on the city health code level. No more fines for bodega cats. And then let's offer free spaying and free neutering for these cats. Nice. That was a start. And that was pretty good. We were really happy with that.

38:46Linda Rosenthal, she starts, and she's been a champion for like animal advocacy for a really, really long time. Linda Rosenthal introduces a bill in the state to officially legalize bodega cats. So there's a Department of Agriculture and Markets, and they're the ones who designate what these markets in New York City are allowed to do. And Bodega Cats was explicitly out, animals in general, out. So she introduced this bill to legalize them on the state level, which we needed. We needed a companion bill to the city. So she introduced this bill, and her bill goes way further, which I love. So the bill, for the first time ever, it sets actual care standards.

39:24So it says that these cats need to be, number one, treated well, clean food, healthy food, nutritious food, clean water, a place to sleep. And if there's signs of abuse, that bill, it designates the Department of Agriculture and Markets to set up like consequences, like actual repercussions. If these cats are not treated well, if they're abused, there's signs of abuse. If it's locked in a basement 24-7, there's actual penalties now. law enforcement can get involved and then take the cat if need be, which right. Take, take the cat. If you need to take the cat. Um, but for the first time we're setting actual care standards.

39:59Uh, the city bill took it really far and the state bill will take it the rest of the way, but it's about protecting these cats who become like cultural institutions and become like vocations and they become a part of, of New York city's culture and, uh, they keep our stores clean. Right. So they're fantastic. Um, so yeah, it's about getting them out of this legal gray area so that the city can step in and provide resources and the state can provide like actual enforcement and actually protect these cats. And so where are you specifically right now with that? So both bills are unfortunately stuck in committee.