There’s a “rat zoo” in Downtown Manhattan, have you been there? Disguised as a public park, the small parcel of land is teeming with rodents as seen in video footage shot by NYCtheBlog. Still, it could be worse.
There’s a recent increase in Brooklyn’s monochrome vermin population à la Roa.
A few weeks ago, the city launched its informational RIP website aimed at providing residents with tips to help reduce the rat infestation plaguing the city and tools to track the spread of the vermin. Turns out that many of Brooklyn’s “trendiest neighborhoods” are hotbeds of rat activity. But ultimately it’s Bushwick, Ridgewood, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Stuyvesant Heights logging the most rodents. |NYDN|
Everyone in New York City thinks they’re the best at everything. “We’ve got the tallest buildings.” “We have the best restaurants.” “We have the biggest rat problem.” Oh, really? As it turns out, when it comes to vermin, Manhattan ain’t got shit on Los Angeles. “Palisades Rathouse” is the skin-crawling tale of Margaret and Marjorie Barthel, a pair of identical twins in their seventies whose love of rats–the wild kind, not the kind you buy at a pet store–has led to a rat boom that may number in the tens of thousands. The twins rarely come outside and are sometimes seen dragging big bags of dog food–for the rats–into their rundown house, which reeks of urine and is so nasty that the kids bypass it at Halloween. Those who peek in the windows spy rats running amok: “Neither inspector knew the rats had chewed through the wood floors of the kitchen, living room and bedroom, allowing themselves free rein from a basement crawling with them.” Included: footage of the furry beasts gone wild.
Illustration: Chris Rahn
Not content on just feeding off the city’s tenants, bedbugs are not feasting on straphangers too. At a recent symposium on the nasty bloodsuckers, Edward Brownbear from the Department of Housing, Preservation and Development mentioned how the bugs spread by attaching to people’s clothing and how have ended up in various subway stations in the Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn. He recalled that most of the resilient vermin were mostly found on subway benches, which as New York Shitty points out “makes sense given it is has been established these little critters like wood.” But just debugging subways and people’s apartments wasn’t the only concern of the day, “some parishioner at the church where this event was held freaked out that people who have bedbugs were allowed on the premises. A bedbug sniffing dog was brought in to make sure everything was ‘all clear,’” according to Heather from NYS. |NewYorkShitty||NYP|
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