Willets Point Development will doom nearly 100 cats in grimy ‘Shea Stadium strays’ colony: ‘Nowhere to go but to their death’
The Willets Point project is intended to revitalize the downtrodden area of central Queens, but activists say developers have neglected to address one key community with squatters’ rights: the so-called “Shea Stadium strays.”
Living in the dust of the Iron Triangle just steps from Citi Field, a colony of grimy and malnourished cats have called the neighborhood home for nearly a century.
As many as 100 felines have already been pushed out of the fields and into the shrinking auto body sector, which is expected to be the next chunk of land leveled to make room for the incoming soccer stadium, retail haven and residential space.
Further displacement would mean marching them to certain doom, animal activists warn.
“They have nowhere to go but to their death. Nowhere to go,” Regina Massaro, the founder of Spay Neuter Intervention Project (SNIP) NYC.
With a 48-pack of Friskies cans in one hand and a gallon of water in the other, Massaro led The Post on a tour of the squalor 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 out into the polluted Flushing Creek or residential blocks as the multimillion-dollar development continues to eat up their home.
“No one cares. These animals have no one to speak for them but me,” Massaro, 74, of Maspeth, said as she picked up a discarded slice of Sicilian pizza, ripped it into bite-sized pieces and tossed it back to the cats.
“I get to leave this place and go home. These cats have to stay here.”
Stray cats have run amok in Willets Point for nearly 100 years and even carved out shelter in Shea Stadium when it was erected in 1964 — with one famously scampering across the Cubs dugout during a 1969 game, cursing the Chicago team and propelling the Metsies to their first World Series title.
The cat population has since boomed, but scarce resources and dwindling land have put their lives in peril, according to activists. Many have already starved to death or succumbed to disease.
Today, many of the auto shop workers help feed the spawning cats, but won’t shell out the costs of veterinarian bills, leaving SNIP NYC to pick up a roughly $2,000 per month tab.
Massaro, known to the auto shop community as “cat girl,” has been visiting 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’s trapped and brought as many as 300 cats to North Shore Animal Hospital for sterilization. She’s been able to rehome only 50 of the friendly cats, but most are feral and have to be re-released to the Willets Point podunk Massaro likened to a third-world country.
The activist was in the middle of feeding a clowder when The Post observed one frantic worker beg her to take and neuter a new cat that was sleeping in his boss’ office. The pet had been “dumped” at the storefront hours earlier, he said.
“When I come into work in the morning, there’s 25 cats outside,” Paul Cohen, owner of Roosevelt Auto Wrecking Office, said, adding that he spends $200 a month on his own cat food for the endless chain of felines. “It’s bad.”
“She does what she can, but she can’t keep up with it. There’s more and more every day.”
One block away, Felix Lara told The Post the plight of the cats is a frequent topic of conversation in the community.
He plans to bring one stray — an unnamed 8-year-old white and brown shorthair who has been visiting his shop since she was a kitten — home with him when the shop eventually shutters, but worries about the dozens of others that have no hopes for domestication.
“What’s going to happen with the cats? We can’t take them. It’s bad,” Lara said.
Massaro’s crusade has involved reaching out to city and state agencies for help, as well as the private developers, which she plans to ramp up as construction for the NYCFC stadium and surrounding buildings continues.
Both the NYC Economic Development Corp and Housing Preservation & Development told The Post it would work with its partners to monitor the situation, but couldn’t say whether it had any plans to deal with the cats. The NYCFC declined to comment and the Queens Development Corp did not return messages.
Requests for comment to Rep. Grace Meng and the mayor’s office were left unanswered. The Queens borough president’s office had no record of complaints relating to the cats, and reps for city Councilmember Francisco Moya said they were looking into the issue.
Although the situation appears bleak, Bryan Kortis of Neighborhood Cats emphasized that hope is not yet lost — but said someone needs to take action before the cats leave on their own and spread the problem elsewhere.
“When you have that type of displacement, and there’s no strategy, there’s no management, it’s just whatever happens that happens to them. They don’t stick around and wait for the bulldozers to kill them; they’re gonna disperse. And they’re gonna disperse to wherever the closest food source and shelter that they can find,” Kortis told The Post.
“They may have to cross a busy road. Cats are extremely territorial, so they may try to return to a situation that’s dangerous. They may not find food sources. There are rabies scares with cats … So there’s a lot of risk,” he said, adding that the animals will only continue to reproduce and prolong the problem if not sterilized in droves.
Kortis suggested a managed retreat, which would involve slowly leading the feral felines to a safer area, or transporting them to a sanctuary.
Ideally, the cats should have been fixed decades ago to avoid the issue altogether, he pointed out.
“If they’d taken our advice back in 2008 and had the cats in those areas trapped and spayed and neutered, we wouldn’t be having this problem today. There’d be a much smaller number of cats, and they’d be much easier to deal with,” Kortis said.
“It’s out of control. Your options are much less. The city has never taken any responsibility for the free-roaming 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 that the cats be free to live out their days in their neighborhood with the support of the government, the Willets Point developers and neighbor Steve Cohen, owner of the Mets.
As “descendants of the Shea Stadium strays,” the felines have squatters’ rights, she claims, saying she’d love to see the Willets Point Development include a space in the 23-acre project to let the cats live out the rest of their lives in safety.
“There are only one of two things that can happen here: they’re either going to stay and get proper shelter for them, that they’re going to be cared for. Or, they’re going to be forced out — and that is death,” she said.
