Last Updated on May 18, 2026 by admin
The fire at 660 East 187th Street in Belmont went up on April 21.
By the time the smoke was out, the families who lived there were not the only ones missing. Some of them still had cats in the building. Cats who had bolted under beds at the first siren. Cats who had wedged themselves into the spaces inside a building that only cats know about. Cats who, after three weeks of nobody home, were almost certainly still alive in there. Cats.
The displaced residents held vigils. They held demonstrations outside the building on Thursday, May 7. They told the cameras the same thing in a dozen ways: please. We know they are still in there. Please let us back in.
Five days later, Kevin Sexton of NYC Animal Care Centers walked out of the building with a black-and-white cat in a trap.
The cat’s name was Oreo.
Oreo had been somewhere in that gutted building for three weeks. The exact location is not the point. The exact location was always, with cats, going to be impossible to predict — under a stove, behind a kicked-in wall, in a closet under a pile of insulation, on top of a kitchen cabinet. What matters is that the cat was alive. What matters is that he was found because somebody set a trap, baited it, came back, and checked it.
The family did not let go of him for some time. There is a video. They are not the kind of family that holds back. They are the kind of family that grabs a black-and-white cat the second the trap opens and hold him up in both hands the way people hold up a child they thought they had lost.
The second part of the story is more complicated.
An orange tabby was pulled out of the same building the same day. The family of a cat named Ritchie thought, for a few minutes, that the orange tabby was theirs. There was an apparent reunion. There were tears. The video would have told the same story as Oreo’s.
Then someone checked. The orange tabby was a female. Ritchie was male. The cat in their arms was named, by another family in the same building, Miss Kitty.
The Ritchie family stayed in the photo a moment longer. The cat went, gently, into different arms.
This is the part nobody talks about with three-week building rescues. Cats look like cats. Orange tabbies look like other orange tabbies. The wait that you have been doing for three weeks does not necessarily end with the cat you were waiting for. Sometimes it ends with someone else’s cat. Sometimes it ends with a small relief that belongs to a stranger.
Both families won that day. One won the cat they had wanted. The other won the cat they had not known to want, but who turned out to be theirs anyway.
The building is still there. There are still residents of 660 East 187th Street holding out hope for the others. There are still traps. There are still volunteers in masks going back in.
Cats are not done coming out of that building.
The first one out was a black-and-white cat named Oreo, after three weeks alone in a gutted apartment building in the Bronx, walking calmly into a trap because somebody had remembered to keep coming back. 🐾
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