N.Y. Today: Rats on the rise

November 8, 2021

By James Barron

It's Monday. Today we'll look at rats in New York, which have become a more serious problem than ever. And with the New York Comedy Festival beginning tonight, we will also look at humor at this moment in the pandemic.

Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times

Rats running amok

Add a plague of rats to everything else New York faces in trying to rebound from the Covid-19 pandemic.

The city's 311 line had received more than 21,000 calls about rat sightings through last Wednesday, compared with 15,000 in the same period in 2019. Health inspections to look for indications of "active rats" nearly doubled in the latest fiscal year. There have also been 15 cases this year of leptospirosis, a bacterial disease that can cause serious liver and kidney damage. In the city, it is typically spread through rat urine, according to health officials. One case was fatal.

Rats are a disturbing urban problem, but hardly a new one — I have written four articles about rats in the past 14 years, including one about a block on the Upper West Side that put up "rat crossing" signs after a frustrated resident saw what he called a late-night rodent "conga line." But as my colleague Ed Shanahan writes, the current surge followed a perfect-pandemic-storm scenario that goes like this:

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When restaurants closed, rats had to scavenge outside more. They found gutters and street-corner baskets clogged with trash because of cuts in the Sanitation Department budget. Illegal dumping increased. With most people stuck at home, so did residential waste.

A few months later, construction, which drives rats into the open and had been halted like everything else, returned. Outdoor dining expanded as restaurants struggled to survive.

[N.Y.C. Rats: They're in the Park, on Your Block and Even at Your Table]

Along the way, the city inspectors who hunt for evidence of rats were assigned elsewhere, including mass vaccination sites and restaurants, where their mission was to see that customers' proofs of vaccination were being checked.

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A wetter-than-usual summer, coupled with other effects of a warming climate that have helped rats thrive, compounded the problem, health officials said. By October, the animals, which breed prolifically, had reached their annual population peak in the city, said Jason Munshi-South, an associate professor of biological sciences at Fordham University.

Now, with temperatures dropping as winter approaches, rats may be somewhat less visible. But they will re-emerge en masse in spring, ready to feast.

When they do, critics say, the restaurant sheds that helped save an industry will be potential feeding grounds. Abandoned sheds are already rodent playpens.

Edward Grayson, the sanitation commissioner, said that last year's budget cuts have largely been restored and that the department "was doing everything we can to keep the streets clean."

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Andy Linares, the president of Bug Off Pest Control Center in Upper Manhattan, said rats had "become more brazen in their quest for food and harborage." He described watching one appear from under a dumpster and "saunter" across the street before slipping down a sewer grate. And Linares, a 40-year veteran of the pest control business, could tell it was a New York rat.

"It was jaywalking," he said.

WEATHER

Start the week off right with sunny skies and temps in the low 60s during the day and the high 40s at night. Expect a light north wind in the morning.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Thursday (Veterans Day).

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Are we ready to laugh again?

The New York Comedy Festival opens today with performances in 17 theaters and clubs. This made me wonder: Are we ready to laugh again?

"I think the question is, are we ready to reflect on what has happened," the comedian Luke Mones, who will appear in a comedy festival show in Brooklyn on Wednesday, told me. "Unquestionably, I think the answer is yes on laughing. People I know who have had a particularly difficult stretch are interested in laughing and using comedy and laughter to reflect and look at the last year and a half and grapple with it."

When he said "what has happened," he was referring, of course, to the pandemic. Even now, nearly a year after the first vaccines were approved, roughly 70,000 people get a coronavirus diagnosis every day. More than 750,000 have died in the United States, including more than 34,000 in New York City. The numbers are down but still disturbing.

Yet the world seems to be shifting to a strategy of living with the coronavirus, and the comedy festival is betting that the best way forward is to listen to someone say, into a microphone, something like, "Well, that was really weird" — and to laugh about it. That was essentially the premise of a joke Mones tells that he called his "bubble bit."

A bit of that bit goes like this: "I see people walking around New York like everything's normal. People are just glassy-eyed, walking down the street like 'I just had brunch in a plastic bubble in the bike lane. Everything is normal.'"

Mones said the bit was rooted in an are-we-ready question, though not the one about laughing: "When are we going to acknowledge the enormity of this situation?"

Maybe this is the moment, at least for those planning to attend comedy festival events. Caroline Hirsch, who founded the festival and owns the comedy club Carolines on Broadway, told me that the tickets for an event tonight at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center had "sold out in a minute." That event, "Stand Up for Heroes," is a benefit for the Bob Woodruff Foundation, co-founded by the ABC News correspondent who was injured in a roadside bomb explosion in Iraq 15 years ago. Some 200 shows have been scheduled for the festival, featuring performers like Jim Gaffigan, Nikki Glazer, Bill Maher and Michelle Wolf.

But about whether we are ready to laugh. I thought the most memorable answer came from the comedian and columnist Maeve Higgins, who described restarting a weekly show that she hosted before the pandemic with Aparna Nacheria and Jo Firestone in Brooklyn. Higgins wrote that the people in the audience could have stayed home and watched "any number of perfect comedy shows" online or on television.

Instead, she wrote, "they spend 90 minutes with us, willing us on as we stumble our way back to funny."

What we're reading

In August, Molly Seidel became the first American woman to win a medal in an Olympic marathon since 2004. Here's how this New York City Marathon crowd favorite did it.
The iconic $1 New York City pizza slice may be no more, thanks to supply-chain shortages and rising costs, The New York Post reports.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is redefining period rooms with a new Afrofuturism exhibit led by the set designer for "Black Panther," The Gothamist reports.

METROPOLITAN DIARY

Paper cook's hat

Dear Diary:

I was walking my dog on the Lower East Side when I saw a man outside a bodega wearing a paper cook's hat and a white apron. He was throwing something into the trash can on the corner.

On the side of the hat, scrawled in red crayon, were the words "It's my birthday. Free hugs!!!"

A woman who was crossing the street yelled to the man in the hat.

"Hey, go get me a couple pieces cheese!" she said.

"What?" he said.

"Go get me a couple pieces cheese."

"I don't know nothin' 'bout cheese."

"A couple pieces white cheese. Got get 'em for me."

"I don't know nothin' 'bout cheese."

The woman handed the man some change.

"Here," she said. "Now go get me a couple pieces cheese."

"I don't know nothin' 'bout cheese."

He took the change, went back into the bodega and pointed to the deli case.