Cats meow gay bar

Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue is not the prettiest patch of real estate. Trucks thunder down the multilane speedway, spewing exhaust onto tire shops and slanted tenements. It's a pothole-pockmarked death trap separating Park Slope from the poisonous Gowanus Canal-brownstones and brownfields. Here, the canal's meow can trump Chinatown's summer reek.

Broken bottles and McDonald's bags line sidewalks. Rivers of green antifreeze dribble down the street. Though a zoning change has paved the path for story structures like a Holiday Inn rising on Union StreetFourth's still frontier territory, fertile ground for degeneracy. This did not escape Brooke Webster.

She once owned Meow Mix, the infamous lesbian dive on a needles-and-psychos stretch of Houston Street. Like all great dives, Meow had rock on the jukebox, grit in its teeth, secrets in the bathroom-and cops on its case. After a decade of city harassment, floods and a Lower East Side gone good, the Meow closed last July.

Webster decided to relocate to Fourth Avenue, a location so perfect even Marty Markowitz agrees. Statistically speaking, Park Slope houses the city's most concentrated lesbian gay. A girl-centric club was a no-brainer, the proverbial Mister Softee outside the playground. After more than a year bar building, Webster transformed an old warehouse into the bilevel Cattyshack.

On weekends, the club's velvet ropes starkly contrast the auto-repair shops and oil spills. They look as natural as a beard on a cat, but it works.

Pride: Queer Columbus in 1969

Gussied-up girls and a smattering of men line up to enter, as I did on a recent Friday night. The bouncer admits me with a toothy smile. This is a pleasant change; testosterone was not always welcome at Meow Mix. I breeze past the purple-felted pool table and ante up at the bar. This must be a formula: Distance from civilization multiplied by auto shops equal drink cost see Chelsea for a primer.

Along the amply sized bar featuring a stripper poletee-wearing crew-cut types and lipstick femmes and the spectrum in between are locked in amiable conversation. In the rear sits a makeshift stage and space for about 75 boogie-woogiers. The painted-cinderblock walls are lined with what look like beer-can holders ringed with light.

It's handsome, if sparsely decorated. But really: The clientele come to scope one other, not art. Up the blue stairs, I'm greeted with a wall of incense-hopefully a one-time error.