purradise found
Growing up, I discovered what my aunt Celyta was up to based on her Christmas presents. It was always something glamorous. When I was little, a copy of Eloise at the Plaza commemorated her work at The Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. I was entranced by illustrations of the lobby my aunt must walk, stylish and sophisticated in skirt sets. One year she gave me a red bottle of perfume with her name printed delicately on the side. I doused myself in the stuff nearly everyday until I had to borrow from my sister’s more carefully rationed bottle. That year my mother showed me an article in a Brazilian tourism magazine, with Celyta posing gracefully in the corner. When my Christmas present arrived in 2017, I was giddy to receive a new hint of her life. I unwrapped a pair of socks, a headband, and a magnet with a printed meme on it. All covered with cat pictures. My aunt had recently decided that her new venture would not be a job at a luxury hotel or overseas company—it would be the opening of a cat café in Miami Beach.
As a kid, two main things characterized my understanding of my aunt. My aunt was a New Yorker, and my aunt was a dog person. According to Celyta, cats were too fussy: in a relationship between pet and owner, there was only room for one persnickety character, and that would obviously be her. She would march around Manhattan with two little white dogs in tow, named Nick and Nora after William Powell and Myrna Loy’s characters in The Thin Man. When Nick and Nora died the apartment felt empty without a pet, so her friend roped her into fostering kittens. Cats stopped seeming persnickety and started seeming headstrong, mini New Yorkers themselves—which she could respect. And so my dressed-in-all-black subway-taking dog-loving New Yorker aunt transformed, announcing her relocation to a hot Florida beach where she would be knee deep in cats and litter boxes for her new business undertaking.
The Cat Café South Beach is a place for people to come hang out with cats, supplementing that quality time with coffees. The concept felt so foreign to me that I needed to step foot in the place to believe in its existence, just after it opened in 2018. The food part of the café greets you first, a beechwood wall with a chalkboard menu detailing the available “Treats for Humans.” In order to comply with Department of Health regulations, the café is separated by big windows from the room where the cats roam free. This room is lovingly called “Purradise”— the first of an onslaught of cat puns I experienced during my time with my aunt. I quickly learned to accept them with a carefully controlled amount of eye-rolling.
Celyta outlined the “Rules of Catiquette” to me, regulations for visiting. For example: do not wake a sleeping cat, let the cats come to you, sanitize your hands, use your inside voices. A careful ratio of humans to animals is preserved so as not to overwhelm the cats. There’s a minimum donation fee and waiver required to enter the room with the cats, although you can come to just watch the cats through the café window. Thirty cats in total reside in “Purradise” or the back room at one time. Right before you walk in, there is a section of the wall covered in photos of happily matched humans and adopted cats. “Purradise” is, fittingly, beach themed. The walls are an electric sky blue with shelves for cats to climb disguised as clouds, and every cat tower is constructed to look like a lifeguard chair or palm tree. With all the puns and artificiality, being inside the café felt like willingly immersing myself into a gimmick.
The café decor adopts the art deco atmosphere of its city, complete with a neon sign logo carrying on the signature style of surrounding storefronts. Celyta’s cat café is situated between the Samaya Smoke Shop and the Art Deco Supermarket on Washington Ave, one of Miami Beach’s busiest streets running parallel to the shoreline. There is a constant buzz of people moving from restaurant to bar to store and back to bar.
Celyta has grown to appreciate the culture of the area even though she despises facing the reality that humans sweat when hot. When news spread that Celyta traded her Manhattan studio for a Miami Beach condo apartment and her leather jackets for white linen clothes, my family was floored. She did not move to retire. According to Celyta, a move to Florida does not always mean you are old, contrary to popular belief. Celyta made it clear that she would not be getting old; family legend holds that her younger sister passed Celyta in age long ago.
Though she has lived in thirteen cities, the only one that truly felt like home was New York. But New York got too expensive and too exhausting, so she left for a little while, which turned out to be a longer while now that she’s tied up with the café. For all her talk about not being like those people who say they will be in Florida for the winter and end up staying for the rest of their lives, Miami has gotten its claws quite securely into her white linen pants.
After dealing with the adjustment to sand, sun, and a complete shift in fashion color palette, Celyta noticed another new feature of life in Miami Beach: the community cats. When she took on her condo apartment, she also inherited the responsibility of looking after a dozen cats. She feeds them water and a mix of wet food and kibble twice a day. She keeps track of them, but refuses to name them because they are community cats, decidedly not her own. Community cats is a term used to describe any unowned cat in the area, friendly or feral. Feeding these community cats is a practice characteristic of Miami Beach, although dedicated caretakers like my aunt are certainly in the minority. Celyta notes that people do their best to look after the cats, but some feed them unhealthy food or leave out plastic plates that become litter. Caring for these cats is so common because the area has such a sizable unchecked cat population, with nearly 400,000 cats roaming free in Miami-Dade County.
Miami Beach’s cat problem is generally blamed on a man named John Newton Lummus. In 1915, Lummus ran for mayor, winning the majority of votes from the thirty three registered Miami Beach voters at the time. Lummus decided to address the overpopulation of rats in the area, bringing in cats as predators, effectively solving Miami Beach’s rodent problem and creating a feline one. Cats can have up to four litters every year with up to six kittens each. So Lummus’ group of successful rat predators ballooned into the hundreds of thousands of cats now roaming the county.
Not nearly as famous as the cats of Rome but almost as numerous, Miami Beach is overrun with these cats—and overrun with people who care about what happens to them. In 2017, an invasive plant species along the beach was being bulldozed to restore the dunes. Neighbors were distraught by this destruction because this vegetation happened to be the shelter for several cat colonies. In 2021, a building was not properly inspected before fumigation and several cats were trapped under termite tents. The responding news station interviewed neighbors deeply grieving the loss of these cats. Incidents like these are not uncommon. The urge that people like Celyta have to protect cats makes sense, given that cats are viewed as domesticated and sympathetic.
But an unchecked cat population isn’t just overwhelming to care for, it also causes problems for the area’s health. As instinctive predators, cats are a threat to biodiversity, having contributed to the extinction of 63 species of birds and mammals. Aside from environmental impacts, the cats of Miami Beach also raise public health issues. Because sand can be contaminated with cat feces, hookworm has become a main concern for the beaches.
Euthanasia is often the solution to the stray animal problem. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) estimates that every year, about 1.5 million animals are euthanized, including 670,000 dogs and 860,000 cats. Delaware is the only state with entirely no-kill shelters, but most states have reduced the number of pets they euthanize per year, opting for no-kill shelters. But shelters that have to resort to euthanasia are often fully open in admissions while no-kill shelters have a far lower capacity. Regardless, the number of abandoned pets in the United States is overwhelming animal services.
In Miami Beach, Animal Services has no space to house stray cats. While Animal Services in Florida will pick up any reported stray dog, they do not respond to stray cat complaints. In 1995, the city’s solution to this was the establishment of a $35 bounty for any stray cat brought in to be euthanized. The bounty was short-lived because of protests that argued that euthanasia is not only tragic, but ineffective compared to sterilization in population control. Cat Network was founded as a nonprofit to help humanely reduce cat overpopulation instead. As opposed to the government management of the feral cats of Rome, the responsibility in Miami Beach lies with a network of nonprofits and volunteers. In 2012, Cat Network organized “Project CatSnip” with the city government. This project coordinates with a nonprofit called South Beach Cats to trap, spay or neuter, and vaccinate cats. Those cats get returned to their colonies or placed in adoption programs, ear-tipped to mark that they have been treated for fleas, dewormed, and vaccinated. The city code dictates possible feeding locations in order to protect dunes and also outlines practices to prevent littering when feeding the cats. And in 2018, Celyta opened the Cat Café of South
Beach to be another link in this network of solutions, taking care of 30 stray cats at a time and trying to get them each adopted.
Celyta’s cat café is not the first one in the United States. Cat cafés have been popping up around the world for about twenty years now. Originally, they were not meant to function as shelters. The first cat café, the Cat Flower Garden in Taipei, opened in 1998 as a tourist destination intended to give people some respite from an urban environment. The phenomenon spread to Japan, where cat cafés gave people the chance to connect with pets they might not be able to own themselves because of rental apartment policies. Cat cafés then spread throughout Europe in big cities. In the UK, Lady Dinah’s Cat Emporium opened to encourage meeting very sophisticated cats while being served high tea.
The earliest cat café in the US intended for adoption opened in 2015, a place called KitTea in San Francisco. Like Miami Beach, San Francisco has a large feral cat population, and similar solutions emerged—now supplemented by KitTea’s promotion of adoption. The cat café idea continued to spread, and now the US has around 140 cat cafés.
The popularity of cat cafés does lie in the promise of comfort that pets can provide, but also in the marketable content they can offer. Cats cornered the market of early Internet memes like Grumpy Cat and viral videos like “Cats vs. Cucumbers.” Puns at Celyta’s cat café make me roll my eyes, but also sort of chuckle. Cats are marketable, when they’re cuddly or when they’re hilarious. That is at the root of cat cafés and is what people like Celyta want to take advantage of. Appearances have always been important to my aunt; marketing is her job and beauty is her hobby. She was the one who told me what foods I should avoid on a first date and what to do if I have dark circles under my eyes. Celyta knows how to put a presentation together, and the marketable quality of cats fits perfectly under her job description. She can capitalize on it to run her business and get some cats adopted.
Celyta’s cat café is meant for the cats. She may own the business and do all the work for it, but she is by no means in charge. My initial walkthrough of the space was meant to be an early impression of the business, and Celyta listened to my every note (to offer more pastries, heat up the croissants, adjust the taste of the latté). But whenever I made a note that overstepped into the domain of the cats’ experience—like my suggestion to play more upbeat music rather than the spa-like playlist she had running—I was ignored and chided for my selfishness. This is why the “Rules of Catiquette” exist, why there is a sign on every window asking people not to tap on the glass, and why children need to be accompanied by adults so that no cat tail ever gets pulled. The café is a purradise for the cats, not for the people who are there merely to keep it running.
It takes work to keep it running. Celyta practically lives at her cat café. When it first opened, the only time she was home for weeks were the six hours she slept every night. The café has to draw people in and hopefully turn a slight profit. So Celyta works hard, and she leans into the gimmicks. She runs cat-themed events like “Purr-lattes: Stretch like a Cat,” where customers can wake up with a coffee before doing yoga poses inspired by cats stretching next to them. At the beginning of October, Celyta called my mother in a panic because her café had a shortage of black cats. It turns out that Halloween actually encourages people to adopt black cats, and she did not have enough. Since she can not control the exact look of the cats she accepts, she had to simply pray for more black cats to arrive before the 31st.
When Celyta strolls into Purradise, her cats flock to her, twisting around her legs to show their love. Even when she is running to chat with a customer or get supplies from the back room, she’ll pause to scratch a cat’s ear. She knows all their names, ages, and personalities. Celyta jokes on many occasions that she has quite literally become a crazy cat lady, and she’s not looking to be corrected. This beach and these cats are her thing now.
Scooping kitty litter is not the picture of glamour I grew up knowing of her, but seeing the work she does now it is clear to me that the character of my self-reliant and free-spirited aunt is still the same as it has always been. Since my aunt has felt like a New Yorker for years despite not always living there, I wondered why that self-definition stuck throughout all this change. For Celyta, being a New Yorker is about “savvy and worldliness.” The aesthetic of being a cat lady in Miami Beach is entirely different from being a chic New Yorker at the Plaza Hotel, but Celyta finds both jobs very similar. It takes a kind of worldliness to help with a problem in the community, and a kind of savvy to find a marketable niche to do that through. All her previous work gave her practice in inventing ways to respond to the needs of a place and its inhabitants. It just so happened that the place was Miami Beach and its inhabitants were its community cats. And now I have an easy solution whenever I’m stuck wondering what to buy her for Christmas—I can never go wrong with anything cat-themed.