“What are you doing way down here?”

Our routine around feeding the cats settled into an early morning schedule so that we could get to it before the big trucks occupied the streets starting about 5AM. We were the only ones on the street except for the scavengers trolling for good junk to cash in over at the recycling yards down Alameda a few miles. We’d do our rounds in my Tacoma with the big pot of food in the back along with the pre-torn squares of butcher paper we used as plates. By this point we had it down to a system. The cats loved a routine. We found it really helped. They’d show up knowing what to expect. It made for a more loyal following.

Occasionally, we’d get a visit from the police. Our actions could look suspicious from a distance. Furtive, even. Crouching down next to the fence outside the Grainger’s warehouse or poking around at the parking lot gate of the place where they made Mochi. Usually the patrol car would speed up as they approached us and skid to a stop. We later decided this was meant to get us to run if we were doing something illegal exposing our guilty intent. We would just stand up and look right at them and wave.hello.

“What are you doing way down here?” one officer asked us. This line became an oft-repeated tag line between Kathy and me as we did our rounds. He apparently did not realize that there were residential buildings in the neighborhood and thought we were far from home at an odd hour of the morning. We explained what we were doing and that we lived only a few blocks away. He was cool after that and asked us about the cats.

There were other times we were interrupted by people looking to buy drugs. One time the guy didn’t believe us when we said we had nothing to sell. So the police weren’t that far out of line suspecting us of breaking the law. It was that kind of neighborhood. Literally marginal. Adjacent to both Skid Row and Little Tokyo. Active in the daytime bit mostly dark and quiet at night. It was mostly uneventful and safe. Once in a while it was, yeah, sketchy.

Dinah and Kareem

Dinah and Kareem are litter mates born in August of 2007. This picture was taken in September of 2023. Photo by Kathryn Hargreaves.

Helping the Feral and Abandoned Cats in LA’s Arts District, 2004-15

When Kathy and I started helping the feral and stray cats in Los Angeles Arts District we never expected it would come to absorb our lives and bring us an enormous and happy family. For this we are grateful. Our cats love us with a devotion that has become the central fact of our existence. And we, of course, love them in return. We began this unexpected phase of our life in 2004 a few years after moving to the Arts District. We noticed a few cats in the neighborhood that looked hungry. These were apparently stray or abandoned cats, former pets that looked to humans for sustenance. So we fed them. At first we would feed in the early evening. Eventually it was very early in the morning when we would feed them. The cats would come out from hiding at that hour and we could get to know them and get to know their lives and problems. There were six colonies with from 3 to a dozen or more cats. They didn’t all reveal themselves at first. Over time more of them would come to trust us and come out of the shadows to meet us. Kathy developed a home made food for them from chicken and pumpkin with many beneficial supplements mixed in. The cats quickly and noticeably looked healthier and calmer.

We began a program of trapping the females and neutering them after they gave birth and then returning them to their colonies. This is a known strategy for controlling wild colony populations, and over the years we worked with the local colonies we saw this plan working and the cats get healthier and the populations level out and start to decline. Returning the neutered cats to their territory meant that the cat could hold onto its niche and not be producing more kittens. We kept the kittens expecting to be able to adopt them out. That never did happen as we fell in love with the little cuties and they became family. Many of those cats are with us still. We also adopted many aging cats from the street that appeared to be abandoned pets and many of them seemed to need a hand in surviving. At one stage we adopted some cats from the pound that were destined for shortened lives and brought them home to meet the rest. After some adjustment everyone learned to live together.

We found out that there were a lot of cats, strays abandoned and feral, living in our neighborhood encompassing perhaps ten blocks of an aging industrial area that had been occupied by artists in the 1970s and was now gradually turning, as all art neighborhoods do, into a chic district of expensive condos and apartments carved from the old building stock. Since we had moved there the district had begun to change from the artists lofts and punk music clubs neighborhood it had been into something lighter cleaner and more restrictive. As gallery owners we had begun to feel like foreigners. As event producers we were the enemy of quiet enjoyment. We came to see ourselves as like the cats; an unwanted nuisance to a particularly uptight new group that came to occupy our former playground. Whereas before everyone participated in feeding the cats this new group explicitly forbid it since the finish on their fancy car’s hood was more important than the comfort and safety of stray and feral animals. “Don’t feed the cats” signs popped up everywhere.

Finally the time came to make our exit and we took our family of happy cats and ourselves to a new playground in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. That was almost ten years ago and many of our cats have passed on leaving behind mounting debt and shrinking bank balances. We persevere and continue to treat each animal as the important individual it is to us, to itself, and to the rest of our colony.

And so we come to our plea; we are not asking for donations. We are offering a selection of cute and attractive items for you to purchase that will help us to continue to nurture our family of oddball cats through to the natural end of their trip here on Earth. We hope you find something here that will resonate with you and remind you of your friends in the foothills tending to their colony of unwanted pests with love, kindness and devotion.