Behold!
The majestic beasts of Lincoln Square!
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So reclusive, so elusive, so easily bored. Felis catus, a.k.a. the domestic cat. On Saturday — or Caturday, as it is now known on the North Side — this rare creature was witnessed lounging in the apartment windows of three-story walk-ups, on porches of Victorian homes, behind mesh enclosures in front yards, at the bottom of baby strollers. Hordes of observers, a thousand or so, clustered on sidewalks, here and there, many with pricey cameras, many more with cat tattoos and cat T-shirts, eager for cat sightings.
A shout rose: “There!”
Fingers flew skyward immediately, as if everyone had spotted a UFO. In a window on Hamilton Avenue, the tabby known as Crumb, a real auburn cutie pie, appeared. Crumb regarded his admirers, then he yawned, then he jumped down, slipping from view again.
“Amazing! A 10 out of 10!” someone said.
Someone else, less impressed with such a brief sighting, quipped: “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I mean, haven’t these cats been schooled yet in the ways of PSPSPSPSPSPSPSPSP?”
The first (and probably not the last) Lincoln Square Cat Tour prowled the streets of this idyllic neighborhood last weekend, drawing several thousand participants, and just to be clear, it was exactly what it sounds like: A two-hour walking tour of the everyday cats of Lincoln Square, with 125 participating residents bringing forth their austere feline companions for public inspection.
People cried, “AWWWWW!”
And, “SO CUTE!”
And, “Oh, look, look, he’s crosseyed!”
They met Leo, whose favorite movie is “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol”; and they met Pudding, who only eats the gravy in her Fancy Feasts; and they met Gertrude on Argyle Street, whose face always seems to ask “Do you smell something burning?”; and they met Marcel Duchamp on Winnemac Avenue; and they met Stone Cold Steve Pawstin on Washtenaw Avenue, who is polydactyl, with seven toes on each of his front paws; and they met Cornbread, who is pushing 20 pounds; and they met Cliff, whose sullen open-mouthed stare and green eyes somehow give him the look of a British mob enforcer (though he’s actually a people cat). They tried to meet Blackbeard, whose owner stepped outside his usual window to scrawl across a whiteboard: “Taking a nap.”
Think part birding expedition, part trick-or-treating, part trip to the zoo (when only some of the attractions are not sleeping), part nature advocacy, and part knowing absurdity.
Grayson Derulo, for instance, liked the attention he was getting, according to his owner, Sarah Corley. He liked the women who swooned before him, he liked the men who admired him. But Grayson Derulo, who is named in honor of the singer Jason Derulo, and whose “full government name” is Grayson Matisse Derulo, soon grew tired of the attention and took a nap. “And so periodically I have had to wake him up and hold him up to show him off to everyone. Basically, I’ve been Lion King-ing him a lot,” Corley said.
She gave out 120 gift bags to his visitors, each carrying a replica of Grayson Derulo’s favorite yellow ball toy. Outside the window of their third-floor apartment, she flew a long row of letter-shaped gold balloons that spelled: “GRAYSON DERULO LIVES HERE.”
Julia Ruby of Glen Ellyn stared at it: “I’ve been smiling all day with this tour. I mean, it’s delightful and silly and fun, and I guess cat people don’t get to celebrate cats the way that dog owners do all the time? When you give them a chance, this is what happens.”
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Actually, that was partly the impetus for the inaugural Lincoln Square Cat Tour, said Christine Blevins, who organized the tour with her friend and neighbor Kalin Webber. (The tour has a Facebook page with more information.)
“I love dogs,” Blevins said. “I grew up with dogs, I have nothing against dogs, but there are so many events for dogs, all the time, and not much for cats, who are introverted and indoors most of the time, and so we wanted to set aside a day to show them love.”
“But we are not anti-dog, to be very clear,” added Webber.
Blevins also noticed that Chicago had not yet jumped on a curious cultural bandwagon and hosted a walking tour of its neighborhood cats, the way several other cities have been doing for years. The trend began about a decade ago in the Wedge section of Minneapolis, where a journalist, John Edwards, bored with the usual walking tours of the neighborhood’s historic homes, proposed a kind of domestic cat show-and-tell, partly as a joke. Yet the idea caught on immediately, sincerely. St. Paul followed. Somerville, Massachusetts, added a tour last year. Sacramento, California, held its first this summer, and though Reykjavik in Iceland began in 2022, more elaborate cat tours have become tourist staples of cities throughout the world, including Istanbul and Japan, where cats carry historic reverence.
“One day last spring I was watching my cat sitting in the window and after years of thinking about this, I just decided to put a note on Facebook, to see if anyone was interested, and right away, it struck a chord,” Blevins said. She met Webber, who works in marketing for a tech company and handled the mapping. She figured she’d get 50 people for a tour and maybe 20 cat owners interested. Instead, more than 2,000 people RSVP’d; and so many cat owners signed up to show off their felines that one walking tour turned into four simultaneous tours, all free, stretching from the Chicago River to Damen Avenue, each walking route devoted to a different section of Lincoln Square.
“We decided not to hold back,” Webber said. “We’d make it a whole Caturday.”
Indeed, the day began with visits to neighborhood animal rescues; as with tours in other cities, cat adoption rests among the messaging here. There is a (sold out) “CatVideoFest 2026” of cat videos at the Davis Theater on Lincoln Avenue. Lincoln Square shops and restaurants offered cat-centric specials. Then after the tours, a free block party beneath a gigantic inflatable cat.
The tours themselves, however, lasted roughly two hours in the late afternoon, “because you just can’t block out four hours for cats,” Blevins said. “They’re very busy.”
Some of these felines, after all, have TikTok accounts; some have portraits of them painted in backyards; one owner presented his cat behind a velvet rope and red carpet.
“Normally, this neighborhood, it’s like a kind of Mayberry,” said Jesus Renteria, who lives in nearby Ravenswood Manor. “Well-meaning, upper-middle-class folks. So this has got to be the quirkiest thing I have seen in this neighborhood in quite some time.”
On every one of those tree-lined streets, you couldn’t miss them.
Cat lovers, patiently lined up on porches to meet cats, to scratch cats, to coo ridiculous sounds at cats. Cat lovers, gazing up at second- and third-floor cats who gazed down languidly. The tour at the southern edge of Lincoln Square was large, about 250 people, guided by a woman named Dawn Glunz whose T-shirt read: “Show Us Your Kitties!” The line of cat lovers behind her stretched at least the length of one entire city block. Kevin Rooney, cradling his cat Luna, saw them coming and said to himself, “Oh my gosh, who is coordinating the marketing for this thing?” The crowd, once satiated by Luna, moved on to Koko, who leapt into his perch in an alley window. (“AWWWW,” everyone cried.)
“Bonus cat!” Glunz announced.
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Camille Billie had been walking her cat Smudge in his stroller when they ran into an endless procession of cat lovers. Smudge stared up from his stroller, bewildered.
A crowd formed around him.
Then they moved on again, growing, splintering, gathering new members as they passed bars and businesses, Pied Piper-like. Regal creatures, too, came and went: Asparagus, Mr. Chips, Miss Piggy, Caviar, Sloan (who stared into the corner of a closet for months), Nimbus (who enjoys the smell of feet), some cats the color of wheat fields, some cats with enormous anime eyes. Some, like Sweet Potato Pixley, carrying his body low and cautious, his eyes wide, appeared overwhelmed.
Cats, of course, were the point.
But community, you realized quickly here, was the byproduct. Lori Lange, who recently moved to Chicago from Des Moines, Iowa, used the tour as a way to meet new neighbors. Behind her, peering from a window, atop a tall gray cat tree, was Karma, her blue lynx point Himalayan with a snaggletooth. Karma has an inscrutable haunted face more typically seen on Nick Offerman. Until recently, Karma, a rescue, wouldn’t allow Lange to pick her up. And now Karma is receiving a stream of visitors. Lange hopes the new Lincoln Square Cat Tour “will go on for years and years and years.”
Karma, she’s harder to read.