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Big Cat with Santa cap.

World's Largest Cat

Field review by the editors.

Pine Island, New York

Nineteen feet long, five-hundred pounds, made of fiberglass. It's certainly possible this is not the World's Largest Cat, but it nonetheless deserves notice.

According to legend, the cat dates from the 1950s, when it was rolled down Broadway in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade [see myth-buster below]. It was on the roof of a Jersey City truck stop beginning in 1965; then relocated the roof to Cliff's Clocks in February 1978, where it stayed until 2007.

The cat is a brown tabby with a grinning, Cheshire Cat-like face -- its eyes round and bulging, a little Christmas stocking cap still perched jauntily on its head.

A pair of angry guard dogs, a chain link fence, and the cat's relative invisibility on its rooftop perch were probably responsible for keeping it intact in an apocalyptic part of New Jersey. By the time of its 2007 disappearance, the cat was looking increasingly tattered, his right eye going a little wonky.

According to Cliff, the cat arrived in February 1978. "I remember, because that's when my daughter was born." A friend of his asked if he could "hold on to it for a couple of weeks" while he got his finances in order. The finances never got ordered, the friend moved to another town ("We still keep in touch," said Cliff) and the cat stayed put. Cliff claimed that the friend, who still technically owned the cat, once had a deal in the works to sell it to Puss 'N Boots, the cat food company, but they backed out of the deal. "It needs a lot of work," Cliff conceded, nodding toward the cat's drooping right eye. "It was never meant to be outdoors."

The big cat.

Cliff said that reports that the cat was originally a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade were incorrect (some say that it was in the Parade 1968-1969) and that these rumors prompted at least one angry phone call to him, from an irate former Macy's employee, who insisted that Macy's never would have paraded something as cheesy as a giant cat with a Santa's hat.

Although Cliff was polite with us, he really didn't want to be bothered by people asking him about the cat.

The cat was taken off of Cliff's roof in 2007 and for the next decade it vanished. Then, in 2020, it was discovered sitting next to an abandoned New Jersey railroad siding. Having survived long enough to be appreciated, the cat was in 2022 given a fresh coat of paint (probably its first in over 50 years) and moved across the state line into New York, where it now shares space with some dinosaurs and hippie buses at an outdoor entertainment venue. The cat's new caretakers call it Christmas Kitty.

World's Largest Cat

Blue Arrow Farm

Address:
86 Glenwood Rd, Pine Island, NY
Directions:
Blue Arrow Farm. On the east side of NY-26/Glenwood Rd, a half-mile north of the New Jersey-New York state line. Ask at the front desk for directions to the big cat with a Santa hat.
RA Rates:
Worth a Detour
Save to My Sights

Nearby Offbeat Places

Pacem In TerrisPacem In Terris, Warwick, NY - 4 mi.
Gingerbread CastleGingerbread Castle, Hamburg, NJ - 9 mi.
Fairy Tale Forest EntranceFairy Tale Forest Entrance, Oak Ridge, NJ - 14 mi.
In the region:
Carpet-Clutching Muffler Man, Jersey City, NJ - 42 mi.

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