Seeing rat city through rose-colored glasses

There’s something particularly piquant about simply walking around with someone new to the city

Banksy Rat Mural in New York, 2008 (caruba)

One of the pleasures of hosting visitors is seeing your neighborhood, and your town or your city, through fresh eyes. There are others, of course: Having an excuse to act like a tourist for a bit—to be so foolhardy as to train up to the Met on a rainy Saturday afternoon, for example—and going out to eat far more often than usual. But there’s something particularly piquant about simply walking around with someone new to the city, and seeing it, for a moment, how they do—and perhaps remembering how it seemed when it was new to you, too.

So of course you can imagine my delighted surprise when my brother’s girlfriend expressed interest in seeing a New York City rat on her first night in the city. Rats! Oh, have we got rats. We knew exactly where to take them, too.

1. Jumping mouse. 2. White footed mouse. 3. Meadow mouse. 4. Brown rat. Also shows, on upper left, a “skull of Meadow mouse” and on upper right a “skull of Brown rat.” (Library of Congress)

A few days later, walking back from dinner, we steered our guests towards a huge rat colony along our usual route to and from Prospect Park. Almost immediately, we spotted some of the creatures scurrying around the triangle of grass at the corner of Clermont and Atlantic Avenues. Rounding the corner onto Carlton Avenue, we couldn’t quite see any rats running around the playground, but we heard their high-pitched squeals in the dark.

Hot pink = rat activity at the time of last inspection.

A heat map of rat reports, with a big red blob over Carlton.

Between Atlantic and Fulton, virtually every tree pit on the east side of Carlton is an entrance into what I can only imagine is a vast underground rat metropolis. The center of activity is in a fenced off enclosure halfway up the street, which was once grassy but is now mostly bald dirt—like the park lawns that lose their grass because of dogs, but instead of dogs, it’s rats.

At that time of night—an hour or two after sunset—the whole area was alive in a way that I don’t usually see because, let’s be honest, I’m generally trying to get past these rats as quickly as possible. But that evening, we took our time. Fresh dirt lay scattered in a halo around one of the tree pit holes, as though some occupant had been very recently doing a spot of spring cleaning. We saw a rat crawling along in the narrow gap between a cement wall and the metal fence—presumably returning home after feasting on the nearby trash mound—where I’ve previously seen dead rats hanging limp over the metal bars, either poisoned or drowned. There was even a rat on the lower branches of one of the sad shrubs that line the edge of the enclosure.

My brother and his girlfriend pulled out their phones to document the rats like they were animals at a zoo—although the barriers here are a little more porous than animal exhibits usually are; there’s a very real chance that a rat will run across your feet.

The Kansans in the group (me, my brother, and his girlfriend) were powerfully reminded of the prairie dogs at the Emporia zoo, which live in colonies that look—from the outside, at least—not all that different from rat nests.

“Dog Town” or settlement of prairie dogs, by Josiah Gregg. From Commerce of the Prairies.

We paused to watch a trio of rats. Two were up on their hind legs—even more reminiscent of prairie dogs now—pawing at each other. The third was snuffling around their feet, until a sudden movement of ours sent them skittering apart.

The handful of people entering and exiting the nearby housing complex shot us sideways glances—understandably so—as we got our rat-watching on. But for a few minutes, it was nice to think of the New York City rats as an attraction, instead of a disgusting hindrance.

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