Courtesy of DOHMH

The Upper West Side has the highest number of rat complaints in the city.

Every Upper West Side resident has a story about their worst encounter with the furry four-legged beasts that roam the neighborhood. For the lucky ones, it revolves around a brief sighting as one or two rats scurry across the street or race along the subway tracks. For the not-so-lucky, the stories are about home invasions, constant scratching sounds, garbage attacks, litters.

Joseph Bolanos has heard dozens of these stories, and has a few harrowing ones of his own. He’s a building manager on West 76th Street and the president of the West 76th Street Block Association who made headlines last year for putting up “Rat Crossing” signs in his neighborhood as a way to call attention to the major infestation in the Upper West Side.

“Originally we had an infestation on our block due to construction on one particular building, a brownstone over on West 76th Street, and what happened was that a lot of workers were eating outside of the brownstone, they were throwing their garbage in open containers, and it really created a situation that the infestation was so overwhelming that the rats were running across the sidewalk at night without fear of pedestrians,” said Bolanos.

He asked the contractor at the construction site to keep a tight lid on food and trash, a request that was initially ignored.

“I was getting reports at first that people might be getting mugged or assaulted because people were hearing screams in the middle of the night,” said Bolanos. “The screams that were being heard were actually by people who had rats at times running right over their feet.”

Fed up with the city and the building owners not addressing the problem, he posted the little signs, which look like miniature versions of the yellow diamond pedestrian signs with a hulking black rat silhouette in the middle, and the story gained local and even national attention. Bolanos said that the media focus combined with the fact that construction on that site is now nearly completion has abated the rat problem on his block, but the fight is far from over.

The increasing number of rat complaints – according to Gothamist, there were around 1,000 calls to 311 about rats from the Upper West Side between 2010 and 2012 – has made Upper West Side residents particularly jumpy. (See our Op-Ed for one local resident’s take and proposed solutions.)

John Mainieri, who also belongs to the block association, confirmed Bolanos’ account of the rat proliferation in the neighborhood. He’s lived on the block since 1995, and said that he’s definitely seen the rat problem worsen over the years.

“The big problem is that the Health Department showed up after the rat crossing signs went up and all the media attention,” said Mainieri. “Suddenly the Health Department showed up and threw down a couple of poison pellets. This was last August; they have not been back since last August.”

The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is the city agency responsible for keeping all pests, including rats, at bay, but the issue is complicated by the fact that property owners are also responsible for keeping their property clear of rodents. (DOHMH did not answer several requests for comment for this article.) Some critics of the city’s handling of the rat issue have pointed to the lack of inter-agency cooperation as a main culprit. The Department of Sanitation, for instance, is responsible for garbage collection but not for rat abatement, and so calls to have sanitation workers pick up trash on different schedules or to install expensive “rat-proof” trash receptacles have not been addressed.

City Council Member Gale Brewer has tried to address some of her constituents’ complaints by acting as a liaison to city agencies and allocating $50,000 in city funding to install solar-powered trash compactors in Verdi Square, a known rat hang-out. Last fall, Brewer wrote to Doug Blonsky and John Herrold, the president of the Central Park Conservancy and the administrator of Riverside Park, about the increasing number of complaints from alarmed parents who spied rats gallivanting around playgrounds in both parks, including Central Park’s Wild West Playground near West 93rd Street, Safari’s Playground near West 91st Street, Mariner’s Playground near West 85th Street, Diana Ross Playground near West 81st Street and the Hippo Playground near West 91st Street in Riverside Park.

“Playgrounds on the west side of Central Park present the unique challenge of being in close proximity to a subway tunnel, which facilitates rodent mobility and breeding,” said Blonsky and Herrold in the letter. “Accordingly, we have been conducting an aggressive rat control program through the use of multiple manual traps that are set inside tamper-resistant boxes and placed in playgrounds during closed hours.”

Part of the challenge is that traps can’t possibly catch them all, and poison – especially, for instance, near a playground – is dangerous not just to rats but to dogs, cats, all wildlife and small children. Rat experts also will point out that as long as there is tastier, more appealing “human food” – our trash – accessible to rats, they won’t even bother munching on the poison pellets.

Bolanos said that trash is the biggest culprit and presents the best opportunity to make a serious dent in the rat population.

“The city puts out garbage the night before. As long as you have 12 to 13 hours where you’re putting your garbage out in plastic bags, which is nothing for a rat to bite through, you’re going to have a problem,” he said. He also noted that the increase in new high-rise buildings on the Upper West Side is contributing to higher piles of garbage on the streets at night.

“Since Sandy, it’s gotten even worse, because all the rats had to move to higher ground,” said Mainieri. “Now even in the cold weather, when you don’t normally see them, you can see them running back and forth and they’re obviously crawling up into the warm cars.”

Bolanos hopes that the city will step up its efforts, going beyond the education efforts they’ve held in the past year and trying to implement real policy changes that might temper the rat population instead of responding to complaints once a neighborhood is practically overrun.

“The Department of Health has told me, well you know it’s very difficult to get janitor and maintenance people to take the garbage out in the morning versus the night before, and I always say to them, listen, 10 years ago when people said that they were going to ban smoking, which is a vice, in New York City, everybody laughed, and now it’s 90 percent smoke free,” Bolanos said. “If we can curtail a vice, you can definitely curtail the scheduling of garbage disposal.”

But as all New Yorkers know, rats aren’t going to completely disappear any time soon.

“Any rat expert will tell you,” Bolanos said. “Wherever there are human beings, there are rats.”

With additional reporting by Joanna Fantozzi & Vanesa Vennard

Fairway responded by calling the incident “unconscionable” and launching a rodent investigation along with renovations that the store says are costing them thousands of dollars. Management has suggested that the nearby construction is the source of the rat problem. Upper West Side shoppers may have some sympathy for Fairway, as residents have been dealing with an influx of the furry pests throughout the neighborhood.

LOCAL PARENT GRILLS ROMNEY
Upper West Side parent and vocal public education advocate Noah Gotbaum attended an Education Nation forum with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney last week and was one of the few audience members able to ask him a question about his education policy ideas. After asking Romney about choice in public schools, Gotbaum said, “The parents here support the union to protect our kids three-to-one over the mayor and the chancellor. That’s a recent poll. So, to say that the unions are holding back our kids, as a parent and as parents in polls said, it’s the opposite.”

Gotbaum was citing a Quinnipiac poll released in February. The poll asked New Yorkers whether Mayor Bloomberg or the teachers’ union could be trusted more to protect the interests of public school students. Sixty-nine percent of respondents who have children in public school chose the teachers’ union, versus 22 percent who picked Blooomberg.
But Romney wasn’t interested in the poll numbers, apparently, and told Gotbaum, “I don’t believe it for a minute,” suggesting that the poll numbers could be manipulated.
“Having looked at schools, I know that the teachers’ union has a responsibility to care for the interests of the teachers,” Romney continued.

Gotbaum said in an email after the event that he felt Romney’s attitude was indicative of the bigger problems in public education.

“Romney’s dismissal of parents’ views and inability to handle the truth reflects the much larger problem in which education policy in this country is made largely by a small group of businessmen and corporate-backed elected officials and foundations who mostly send their kids to private schools yet brook no dissent whatsoever from public school parents, teachers, principals, students and educators who live in the system,” Gotbaum wrote.
GARODNICK PROPOSES SICK LEAVE COMPROMISE
Upper West Side City Council Member Gale Brewer has been pushing to pass the paid sick leave bill that she authored, but has been thwarted thus far by Speaker Christine Quinn’s refusal to bring the bill to a vote. Mayor Bloomberg has made it clear that he would veto it, citing a negative effect on small businesses. But now a new version may make its way to the floor of the council and could win over critics. Council Member Dan Garodnick proposed four amendments to the bill that so far have been well received, as the New York Times reported last week.

The biggest change would be to lower the number of paid sick days required for businesses with 20 or more employees. Currently, the bill requires businesses with more than five employees to provide five paid sick days annually, and businesses with 20 or more employees to provide nine paid sick days. Garodnick’s amendment to “remove the cliff” and simply require all businesses with over five employees to give five days quells small businesses’ concerns that the higher number would keep businesses from hiring more workers to avoid bumping up to nine days. Garodnick also proposed exempting seasonal employees, allowing employees in the service sector to swap shifts if they’re sick without having to utilize a paid sick day, and limit the time in which an employee could sue for paid sick leave benefits.

Caroline Bragdon, a research scientist with the Department of Health’s Division of Veterinary and Pest Control Services, came to the meeting at the community board office armed with more rat photos and information than most people would care to absorb in a lifetime. But part of the whole problem, she explained, is that people make incorrect assumptions about how to deal with rats instead of learning the facts.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer came by to express his solidarity—he lives among the rats too—and seriousness in combating what he said is the number one complaint his office receives, Manhattan-wide.

“The rats on my block, they don’t scurry anymore, they walk upright. They greet me and say, ‘Hello, Mr. Borough President, how are you this morning?’ ” Stringer said to knowing chuckles. “Part of what we have to do is think strategically about how to deal with this, because obviously no one wants to see rats scurrying around the community. It frightens senior citizens, it poses a danger to children, and it doesn’t give a lot of confidence in the city to see rats running rampant in the neighborhood.”

What makes the rat problem so intractable is that they love living in close proximity to people, who unwittingly provide all the food a family of the critters could ever want just in our garbage.

“Rats eat everything, and they especially enjoy things that we eat,” Bragdon said. And, confirming many people’s worst fear, “they usually live outside, but if you have food right on the other side of a non-pest-proof door, they will go inside, if you make it that easy for them.”

The recent warm winter has also exacerbated the issue, since it allowed the rats to continue breeding without the usual slowdown that comes with the extreme prolonged cold.

Along with learning that a full grown rat is mostly fur and can squeeze through any opening the size of its skull—roughly as big as a quarter—attendees at the Rat Academy learned how to prevent and exterminate the rodents, as well as how not to.

The basic lesson is that rats are attracted to food and are good at finding it. They can gnaw through almost anything. Poison, while an option, is itself problematic. For one thing, it needs to be applied strategically and by a professional. For another, some of the options that might work best, like tracking powder, are illegal and could easily also poison children, pets and other animals. The biggest hurdle, however, is getting the rats to actually eat the poison (Bragdon said it’s like “dry granola” to rats), which they won’t do if there is other, more delicious, food in the vicinity.

Simple tactics like putting the garbage out later or spraying down sidewalks to rid them of the urine paths rats follow to communicate with each other can help, Bragdon said. Plugging up holes and keeping litter off the streets is essential. Armoring all trash in lidded steel, just about the only thing that rats can’t chew through, is the best option, but more easily said than done.

On the East Side, the biggest problem area in the past has been Tramway Park, according to Council member Lappin’s office. The Parks Department has been acting to keep that area cleaner, however, which seems to be working.

“I find that if your block does the right thing, your building does the right thing, the problem is seriously abated,” Coucil Member Gale Brewer said. “The workings of the building managers really doing everything properly really gets rid of the problem.”

Some rat academy students asked if the folk remedies they’d heard, like sprinkling cayenne pepper or using mint-scented trash bags,would be effective, but Bragdon dismissed each desperate theory with a grim shake of her head.

“Remember,” she said. ‘This is the most successful mammal on Earth.”