By Albert Amateau
It was Kitty’s 18th birthday and her West Village friends turned out in force on the night of Sept. 23 to wish her well. She looked just fine and enjoyed all the attention.
Longtime patrons of La Bonbonniere, on Eighth Ave. near Jane St., will remember Kitty, the gray tabby, who was a fixture in the diner for years until 2004.
“She was really the hostess,” said Marina Cortez, who owns the diner with her partner Gus Maruleti. “She used to stand outside the door, come in and sit at a table and sometimes she sat in peoples’ laps,” Marina said. “They loved her and she brought us a lot of happiness.”
Marina and Gus had taken over La Bonbonniere around 1987 from Charles Dirats, the previous owner, who had run it for 35 years.
“Gus got Kitty from the bakery in Astoria where we bought our bread. She was only a few weeks old,” Marina said, recalling the September day in 1991 when Kitty arrived at the diner.
Nayelli McDermott, who has lived above La Bonbonniere for 14 years, said that patrons knew when Kitty emerged from her nighttime quarters in the basement that she was the cat in charge.
Health inspectors, however, were not as accepting as the patrons were of Kitty’s having the run of the place, so when they came, Kitty had to be hidden or sent to a neighbor’s home. And when she appeared during inspections, the fines began to mount.
“They [inspectors] became very strict a few years ago,” Marina said. Fortunately, Alice Carey and Geoffrey Knox, of W. 11th St., La Bonbonniere patrons and devoted cat lovers, came to the rescue.
Indeed, Carey had assumed the duty of escorting Kitty to her visits to the vet several years earlier. And in 2000 when health inspectors were going through an especially unrelenting phase, Knox gave Kitty a temporary home in his Chelsea office.
Carey, whose memoir of her peripatetic Ireland-New York girlhood, “I’ll Know It When I See It,” is still selling, was getting over the death in 2003 of the couple’s beloved tortoise Manx cat, Lillie (named for the 19th-century stage beauty Lillie Langtry).
“We waited a year after Lillie died before taking Kitty in 2004,” Carey said. “She didn’t know what a couch or a pillow was, but she took to her new life. She listened to jazz; she was able to visit the garden.”
And she was made much of at annual birthday parties in the courtyard of the five-building co-op on W. 11th St. between Greenwich and Washington Sts. where Alice and Geoffrey threw Kitty’s Sept. 23 birthday bash.
