MINNEAPOLIS — On a warm Saturday in July 2019, a 911 caller reported a disturbance at 24th and Colfax in south Minneapolis: a group of 100-some people in the street, not letting vehicles pass.
The incident soon appeared on a local police scanner Facebook page, stirring fear of a fomenting protest. Finally, one amateur sleuth suggested that perhaps it was just the annual Wedge neighborhood cat tour and posted a link to the event page.
Commenters pounced:
“Please, someone tell me that the cat tour is a joke. Please.”
“I thought surely this is an article from the Onion.”
“Settle down, neighbors! Its [sic] hard to imagine anything less threatening than the Wedge Cat Tour, folks.”
“What the hell is a cat tour?”
John Edwards, organizer of the annual Wedge Cat Tour, in its fifth year, was amused by the neighbors’ alarm, considering his harmless intent. “Just show us your cats and there won’t be any trouble,” he joked.
Each summer, Edwards leads cat lovers through his neighborhood, stopping to see the resident furballs perched in windowsills, or pried off the purr-niture and toted outside to greet the crowd. Biographical details are shared, photos are taken, whiskers are rubbed, and the group moves on.
Over time, the Wedge tour — the only known neighborhood cat tour of its kind — has become a branded affair, complete with commemorative, limited-edition cat-tour buttons, tote bags and T-shirts. For safety’s sake, Edwards has even made handheld “Caution! Cat Tour Approaching” signs.
The tour has drawn big crowds. Due to COVID-19, last year’s event was virtual (an hourlong livestream of Edwards walking the route), but in 2019, more than 300 cat tourists viewed 50-some felines.
Further cementing the tour’s status, the internationally famed (and grammatically maddening) internet meme site I Can Has Cheezburger featured the event, crowing, “Minneapolis, Minnesota, Has An Actual Tour Event Where You Go And See The Residential Cats In The Neighborhood.”
Before John Edwards was the cat tour guy, he was a graphic designer moonlighting on social media as Wedge Live, a source of hyperlocal news and commentary about the pie-shaped neighborhood between Hennepin and Lyndale avenues, colloquially known as the Wedge.
Shortly after Edwards moved to Minneapolis nearly a decade ago, he began live-tweeting his neighborhood association meetings. The neighborhood had recently lost its longtime newspaper, and in its own way, WedgeLive.com and its associated social media channels filled the gap.
Meanwhile, Edwards cultivated another pastime: spotting window cats on his neighborhood walks. Posting their photos to social media drew lots of likes, and soon #CatsoftheWedge content on Wedge Live rivaled one of Edwards’ primary political interests, increasing housing density.
In 2017, Edwards co-founded Neighbors for More Neighbors, an advocacy group that mobilized to help pass Minneapolis’ 2040 plan, which eliminated single-family zoning citywide. He developed a reputation for turning City Hall machinations into digital memes, such as the shlocky satirical video “Planning Commission B-Boy Ultramix” and various montages mocking public commenters spouting NIMBY rhetoric.
Though seemingly unrelated, there’s a link between his interest in window cats and zoning, Edwards said.
The reason window cats are “even a thing,” Edwards explained, is due to his neighborhood’s density and scale: an abundance of mid-rise apartment complexes situated close to the street. Surely there are window cats in Linden Hills manors and North Loop high-rises, but their concentration or level of visibility isn’t the same.
“If you walk around here, you’ll see cats all the time,” Edwards said. “It feels like something that is unique to the Wedge neighborhood.”
Edwards created the cat circuit in response to a walking tour of the neighborhood’s stately Colonial Revivals and Queen Annes.
“It kind of came about as making fun of the idea that they’re celebrating 100-year-old single-family homes, and asking, ‘How do I celebrate the idea of lots of people living in apartments?’ ”
Though Edwards considers the tour “mostly just stupid good fun,” he takes satisfaction in drawing a larger audience to go see cats than historic homes.
