The Willets Point project aims to revitalize the depressed central Queens neighborhood, but activists say developers have neglected to address a key squatter rights community: the so-called “Shea Stadium drifters.”
Living in the dust of the Iron Triangle, just steps from Citi Field, a colony of filthy, malnourished cats has inhabited the neighborhood for nearly a century.
No fewer than 100 felines have already been chased off the fields and relocated to the declining car body sector, which is expected to be the next piece of land levelled to make way for the future football stadium, shopping paradise and residential areas.
Further movements would lead to their certain end, animal rights activists warn.
“They have nowhere to go but to death. Nowhere to go,” said Regina Massaro, founder of the Spay Neuter Intervention Project (SNIP) in New York.
With a 48-pack of Friskies in one hand and a gallon of water in the other, Massaro led The Post on a tour of the misery Wednesday afternoon, just hours before thousands of baseball fans gorged on hot dogs and beer as they watched the Mets destroy the Red Sox, 8-3.
The contrast couldn’t better illustrate the catastrophe, Massaro said: The animals will soon be pushed into the polluted Flushing Creek or into residential blocks as multimillion-dollar development continues to devour their habitat.
“Nobody cares. These animals have no one to speak for them but me,” said Massaro, 74, of Maspeth, as he picked up a discarded slice of Sicilian pizza, tore it into small pieces and tossed it to the cats.
“I can leave this place and go home. These cats have to stay here.”
Stray cats have been roaming Willets Point for nearly 100 years, even taking up residence in Shea Stadium when it was built in 1964. One famously ran into the Cubs dugout during a 1969 game, cursing the Chicago team and propelling the Mets to their first World Series title.
The cat population has since exploded, but scarce resources and dwindling land have put their lives at risk, campaigners say. Many have already died of starvation or succumbed to disease.
Today, many auto shop employees help feed the breeding cats but don’t want to pay the veterinary bills, leaving SNIP NYC with a bill of about $2,000 a month.
Massaro, known in the auto shop community as “cat girl,” has visited the Iron Triangle in the middle of the night five times a week for 17 years to feed the cats and set traps.
Over the years, she has captured and brought as many as 300 cats to North Shore Animal Hospital for spay and neutering. She has been able to rehome only 50 of these friendly cats, but most are feral and slated for release into the Willets Point podunk that Massaro likened to a third-world country.
The activist was feeding a cat when the Post saw a frantic employee begging her to take in and spay a new cat that was sleeping in her boss’s office. The animal had been “abandoned” in the store hours earlier, he said.
“When I come to work in the morning, there are 25 cats outside,” said Paul Cohen, owner of Roosevelt Auto Wrecking Office, adding that he spends $200 a month on his own cat food for the never-ending chain of felines. “It’s terrible.”
“She’s doing what she can, but she can’t keep up. There are more and more every day.”
A block away, Felix Lara told the Post that the plight of cats is a frequent topic of conversation in the community.
He plans to take home one stray cat — an 8-year-old white-and-brown shorthair whose name he doesn’t know, who has frequented his shop since she was a kitten — when the shop finally closes, but he worries about the dozens of others who have no hope of domestication.
“What will happen to the cats? We can’t take them. It’s terrible,” Lara said.
Massaro’s crusade has included reaching out to city and state agencies for help, as well as private developers, which she plans to ramp up as construction of the NYCFC stadium and surrounding buildings continues.
The NYC Economic Development Corp and the Housing Preservation & Development Corp both told the Post they would work with partners to monitor the situation, but could not say whether they had plans to care for the cats. NYCFC declined to comment, and the Queens Development Corp did not respond to messages.
Requests for comment to Rep. Grace Meng and the mayor’s office went unanswered. The Queens borough president’s office had no record of complaints about the cats, and representatives for Councilman Francisco Moya said they were looking into the matter.
Although the situation appears bleak, Bryan Kortis of Neighborhood Cats stressed that hope is not yet lost, but said someone needs to act before the cats leave on their own and spread the problem elsewhere.
“When you have this type of displacement, without strategy and management, what happens to them happens to them. They don’t sit there and wait for the bulldozers to kill them; they’re going to disperse. And they’re going to disperse to wherever they can find the closest food source and shelter,” Kortis told the Post.
“They sometimes have to cross a busy road. Cats are extremely territorial, so they may try to get back into a dangerous situation. They may not find food sources. There are fears of rabies in cats… So there are a lot of risks,” he said, adding that the animals will only continue to breed and prolong the problem if they are not mass sterilized.
Kortis suggested a managed retreat, which would involve slowly driving the wild cats to a safer area or transporting them to a sanctuary.
Ideally, cats should have been treated decades ago to prevent the problem altogether, he said.
“If the authorities had followed our advice in 2008 and had the cats in those areas sterilized and trapped, we wouldn’t have this problem today. There would be far fewer cats and they would be much easier to care for,” Kortis said.
“It’s out of control. Your options are far fewer. The city has never taken any responsibility for the stray cat situation… It’s been a chronic problem for many, many years and it leads to situations like the one you have in Willets Point.”
Massaro would prefer the cats be free to live out the rest of their days in their neighborhood with the support of the government, Willets Point developers and neighbor Steve Cohen, owner of the Mets.
As “descendants of the stray cats from Shea Stadium,” the felines have squatter’s rights, she says, adding that she would like to see Willets Point Development include space in the 23-acre project for the cats to live out the rest of their lives in safety.
“There are only two things that can happen here: either they stay and get proper shelter, and they are taken care of, or they are forced to leave, and that is death,” she said.
