ABOUT

Mission: To rescue cats from life-threatening situations such as Under-resourced shelters and to find friendly, quality homes for them through our adoption program.

The Catcade is a non-profit, arcade-themed cat rescue, lounge, and our version of a cat café. Our lounge simulates a home environment. Cats are not kept in cages, instead they get to live in our 950 sq. ft. lounge where guests can pay $20 to visit the lounge and spend time playing, cuddling, and socializing our rescue cats. All of our cats are adoptable, with the exception of our resident cat Leo.  

After spending six and a half years at our original location we purchased a building, completely renovated it, and moved into our new space at the beginning of 2024. Now guests can come and hang out with our adoptable cats in the lounge. You can bring your laptop to do a little work on our free wifi, sit around with a cat on your lap, or play free-play arcade games, plus there's also Nintendo64 Mario Kart which is a fan favorite. We work with several open-intake shelters throughout the Midwest and rescue the cats and get them all of their medical needs. All of our adoptable lounge cats are vaccinated, dewormed, spayed or neutered, microchipped, and tested for FIV/Felv. If you are not able to adopt that is okay, because just by coming in and visiting you are helping to support our mission of saving cats. The entry fee goes to directly help offset the cost of medical treatment for the cats and operating expenses for the shelter. 

Who We Are

The Catcade was started in 2017 by fellow cat lovers, Chris Gutierrez and Shelly Casey. They had one mission in mind when creating their concept and that was their love of felines and the need to “save more cats”. They have traveled all over the world and in every location they visit their mission is to find the cat-related “thing to do”. After talking over the idea of starting a cat café for years, one night while watching bad reality tv the pair came up with The Catcade concept. In January of 2017 they officially created their non-profit and fundraising and looking for a location. On August 19, 2017 they opened the doors to The Catcade at 1235 W Belmont Ave in Chicago. They poured everything they had into their passion of saving cats and are proud of the work they do every day at The Catcade. 

In 2024 The Catcade moved into their own building they purchased and completely renovated.

Our numbers

We frequently say that “it isn’t about the numbers” but at the end of the day each number represents a precious life that we saved and sharing those lives is important.

In 2021, we took in 507 cats and found 431 of them forever homes. We started the year with 21 cats in our care and ended with 70 cats in our care. On average the cats spend about 39 days in our custody. In total, we cared for 528 cats in 2021.

Our live release rate is calculated by dividing the live outcomes (433) by the total outcomes (456) for a 94.96% live release. Our save rate is our intakes (507) - deaths/euthanasia (25) divided by intakes (507) for a 95.07% save rate.