Cats and humans alike dressed up in costumes and roamed the streets of Bowmanville on Caturday, strolling past dozens of homes to meet the neighborhood's resident felines. The Oct. 10 event marked Chicago's second-ever cat tour, drawing roughly 300 people to the far North Side neighborhood for an afternoon of whimsy, bingo and more than a few very good boys and girls.
Exactly 40 homes had registered cats for the tour, according to Block Club Chicago, with some houses showing off more than one cat. Unregistered homes got in on the fun too, offering up what organizers called “bonus cats” along the route, as reported by Block Club Chicago. Some attendees even brought their own cats from outside the neighborhood to join the parade of paws.
Jen Jaco made the trip from Forest Park with her 1-year-old cat Quincy, who rode in a stroller for the occasion and, according to the outlet's report, met about 300 people and got plenty of social time along the way. Elsewhere on the route, a cat named Pepper took home the costume contest crown dressed as a dinosaur.
Two Routes, Lots Of Bingo
The Bowmanville Cat Tour offered two separate walking routes this year — the Murder Mittens Tour and the Teefies Tour — both launching at 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., per chicagocattours.com. Each route was expected to take roughly one to one and a half hours to complete, giving tour-goers plenty of time to wander and meet cats along the way.
Cat tourists could also fill out bingo cards based on feline behaviors spotted during the walk, with squares for scenarios like “cat choosing violence” and “cat licking treats off of a window,” the same site notes. Attendees who completed their cards could submit them for a chance at prizes, adding a game-like layer to the neighborhood stroll.
A Stop At A Local Cat Shelter
One stop along the tour brought visitors to Touched By An Animal, a cageless cat shelter in Bowmanville that cares for between 70 and 100 cats on a typical day and gives its residents access to an outdoor catio, according to Block Club Chicago's report. The nonprofit, described by chicagocattours.com as focused on rescue, medical care, adoption and sanctuary work, benefited directly from the day's festivities.
Organizers sold merchandise to raise money for the shelter, including shirts reading “Show Us Your Kitties” that were hand screen-printed by Ginger and Lime, a female-owned print shop in Ravenswood. Organizer Kalin Webber said shirt sales cover the cost of putting on the tour itself, while extra proceeds will support next year's Lincoln Square Cat Tour and Touched By An Animal, per the same account.
Born In Lincoln Square, Already Spreading
Webber and Christine Blevins co-organized the Bowmanville event after holding their first cat tour in Lincoln Square back in August, an outing the outlet's report called a huge success. That inaugural tour was a roughly two-hour walking event with 125 participating residents, according to the Chicago Tribune, though turnout estimates for the cats and crowds vary between outlets. The Tribune reported more than 2,000 RSVPs that forced organizers to split one planned walking tour into four simultaneous routes, while the Chicago Sun-Times put the cat count at more than 125 along four guided routes named Chonk, Zoomies, Primordial Pouch and Toe Beans. A later Block Club Chicago report instead pegged the inaugural event at 120 cats and estimated more than 3,000 attendees, a figure credited to Blevins and Webber themselves.
Organizers have said the tours are likely to return next year, and chicagocattours.com states that the larger Lincoln Square Cat Tour is planned to come back in 2027, expanding to include Lincoln Square, Ravenswood and Bowmanville. That would fulfill hopes expressed after the first event, when organizers and attendees told Block Club Chicago they wanted the tour to return and spread to additional neighborhoods.
Part Of A Bigger Trend
Chicago's cat tours are riding a wave that started about a decade ago in the Wedge section of Minneapolis before spreading to cities including St. Paul, Somerville, Sacramento, Reykjavik, Istanbul and several cities in Japan, according to the Chicago Tribune. The format has kept rippling outward this fall: in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, hundreds of people and their cats filled the streets for the first annual Cambridge Cat Tour, a parade-style walk with more than a dozen stops, as reported by Cambridge Day. After that heavy turnout, Cambridge's mayor said she hopes the tour can become an annual tradition there, too — much like Bowmanville's organizers are hoping to build something lasting on Chicago's North Side.
