Molly, the Shop Cat Who Spent 14 Days Inside a Greenwich Village Wall

The true story of Molly, the Myers of Keswick shop cat who spent 14 days trapped inside a wall on Hudson Street in 2006, and the unlikely rescue that made her famous.

In late March 2006, a black cat named Molly wandered into a narrow gap between two buildings on Hudson Street and vanished.

Molly, the famous shop cat of Myers of Keswick on Hudson Street.

She had been the shop cat at Myers of Keswick, a British specialty food store at 634 Hudson Street in the West Village, for only three months. Peter Myers, the owner, had adopted her in January to keep mice out of the 157-year-old building. By Easter, she had already learned the rhythms of the store. She liked to sit by the front door and watch the street.

That Sunday, Peter closed up and left food out for her as usual. When she did not appear Monday afternoon, he assumed she had found a warm corner somewhere. By Tuesday, he knew something was wrong. He whistled for her outside. A faint meow came from somewhere in the walls.

What followed was one of the strangest animal rescues New York had ever seen.

The fire department arrived first. They found a small hole between Myers of Keswick and the building next door. Molly had likely slipped through while exploring, then gotten lost in the labyrinth of pipes, beams, and crawl spaces inside the century-old structure. They could hear her crying, but they could not see her.

The NYPD's Emergency Service Unit came next with thermal sensors and snake cameras, the kind with a flexible tube and a lens at the end. They fed the cameras into the walls. Nothing. The building was too old, too dense with debris and dead spaces.

Volunteers showed up with traps baited with food. Molly ignored them. Someone brought kittens, hoping their cries might draw her out. That did not work either.

A pet psychic stopped by. So did a self-described "cat therapist." The media descended. CNN covered the story. The New York Post ran the headline "Get Me-Out!"

Two Weeks in the Walls

For 14 days, Molly's cries echoed from inside the walls. Pedestrians on Hudson Street could hear her from the sidewalk. Crowds gathered outside the store. The story went international.

Finally, someone called Kevin Clifford.

Clifford was a sandhog, one of the tunnel workers digging the third water tunnel beneath the city. He had spent years boring through rock hundreds of feet underground. He volunteered to help.

On Friday, April 14, 2006, at 11 p.m., Clifford and Mike Pastore from Animal Care and Control made one last attempt. They had narrowed Molly's location to a spot about 15 to 20 feet from the front of the building, up near the ceiling. Using a sound-sensing meter under a blanket for absolute silence, they pinpointed her position.

"Peter told us we had one shot at it," Pastore later recalled.

Clifford drilled through a layer of sheetrock, then three layers of brick. He stuck his head through the hole and saw her: a black cat sitting on a mound of debris, wedged between the bricks and a piece of sheet metal.

He grabbed her by her back legs. Her claws flew in every direction. They got her into a carrier.

Outside, a crowd of reporters and onlookers had gathered in the dark. When Peter Myers walked out holding Molly in her cage, the cameras flashed. She looked, by all accounts, remarkably calm.

"I think you'll all agree that she is in great shape," Peter said.

Her rescue was announced at a Mets home game. Over the next few days, she appeared on Regis and Kelly and Good Day New York. Tourists started visiting the shop just to see her. Peter considered making "I Met Molly at Myers" t-shirts.

But Molly did not return to work. The Health Department reminded everyone that animals are technically prohibited in food establishments. She became a house cat, living with Peter and his wife Irene.

Nobody ever figured out how she survived those two weeks. The best guess was mice.

Molly lived another 15 years. She died in December 2021 after a short illness.

Myers of Keswick is still there. The walls have been repaired.