BY FACEBOY | For this installment of NYCritters we travel to Brooklyn to spend some time with a very special cat.
Lenny resides in the Velo Brooklyn-Bushwick Bike Shop. He usually sleeps in the afternoon but must have known The Villager was coming to write about him since he was clearly ready for his close-up. Lenny, along with his littermate Carl, was rescued by two women nearly 15 years ago and adopted as kittens by the bike shop’s owner, K. T. Higgins.
Despite two days of cleaning to prepare for the kittens, the adoption almost fell through.
“We gutted the place and cleaned it, but we drank a lot of beer while we were doing it, so then we had to clean our beer mess and then we had to clean the mess from when we were drunk,” Higgins explained. “So the ladies come over as we finished and saw that there was a ton of beer cans and thought that we were unfit parents.”
Fortunately, Higgins was able to convince them that she would be a responsible mom. Carl lived to be 13, and Lenny has been delighting many people in the neighborhood, who frequently come in to give him a pet or an embrace.
Lenny never hunts or kills anything.
“Lenny will live alongside anybody and anything,” Higgins said. “Like a dog — when Lenny meets a dog he’ll live along with it. When he meets other cats he’s territorial but he won’t fight. He lived alongside a hornet for three days in the bike shop window.”
Carl was quite different and brought Higgins many, umm…“presents.”
“Countless huge rats,” she said. “He even tried to bring me cats. He never successfully killed a cat, but he tried. He would run for blocks hunting cats and Lenny would just sit there looking alarmed and concerned with his big yellow eyes.
“Lenny is very animated. He’s like Japanese anime. He’s that friendly good guy — that typical happy fun-loving cat.”
As a black cat, however, he has faced some superstitious discrimination from some of the people in the neighborhood. When there were two black cats in the shop, some people would refer to Higgins as the witch lady.
As a female in a field predominantly run by men, Higgins has dealt with a lot of gender discrimination, as well. In 1896 Susan B. Anthony told The New York World’s Nellie Bly that bicycling had “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”
Yet, today Higgins assures that there is still a long way to go for female bike mechanics and shop owners to be fully accepted in the field.
You can get all of your bicycle needs met at the Velo Brooklyn-Bushwick Bike Shop, at 1345 DeKalb Ave., Monday through Friday, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m.
Getting back to Lenny and how incredibly nice it was to visit him, The Villager has been told that he’s truly kind to everyone. Lenny has never swatted at or even hissed at a person. Carl might have been a little psycho. But Lenny? He wouldn’t even harm a fly.
