New York’s New ‘Tourist Attraction’: Night Walks to See Rats

Last April, the mayor of New York, Democrat Eric Adams, took the bull by the horns, but in this case rather the mouse. Faced with the failure of the fight against the city’s “public enemy number one”, the former police officer appointed a “tsarina” to fight against the plague of rats which affects the Big Apple.

But apparently the efforts of Kathleen Corradi, the new head of Rodent Mitigation, They have not been entirely satisfactory. A few days ago, the “rat czarina” of New York acknowledged that a powerful contraceptive – called ContraPest – that has worked against rodent populations in Florida and California has almost no effect in the Big Apple according to local news portal Gothamist.

Although authorities claim that since Corradi’s appointment there has been a 20% decrease in rat observations, ContraPest’s failure would add to other attempts: they have previously resorted to poison, birth control pills, trained dogs, the use of dry ice or dry ice, sticky traps or drown in alcohol to combat them.

One of the urban legends surrounding the Big Apple is that there are as many rats in New York as its 8.5 million people, which was recorded by the famous English novelist Charles Dickens who complained about the presence of rodents when he visited the city in 1842, recalls El Mundo.

Some time ago, in 2015, a video went viral thanks to its particular protagonist: a rat was running down the stairs of a metro station – which is not strange, say the inhabitants of the city – but he did it with a whole slice of pizza. between his teeth, earning him the nickname “Pizza Rat”.

And it is precisely the “Pizza Rat” who is causing a new phenomenon in the city. Tourists coming to New York looking for a truly off the beaten path and authentic experience now have something very special to do: take night tours check the growing population of rats.

According to specialists, the craze for this type of circuit started seven years ago, precisely because of the viral video featuring “Rata Pizza” : on YouTube, it has 12 million viewers.

Kenny Bollwerk is one of the guides who plotted the rats’ nighttime routes near Rockefeller Center in Manhattan and Flushing and Sunnyside in Queens. Luke Miller, owner of “Real New York Tours,” stops at Columbus Park near Chinatown to eccentric tourists fascinated by insalubrity.

“They’re like the new celebrities in New York, with all the press they get,” Miller told the New York Post. “Rats are like a New York mascot,” Bollwerk said. “People want to see them for themselves.”

And it is that he rat tourism quickly becomes a booming industry, notes the Guardian newspaper. Bollwerk, who has built a following on TikTok by posting videos from all over New York, became a rodent guide after spending ‘an hour or two’ live-streaming rats running past a construction site in Sunnyside , in Queens.

“I was like, ‘Damn, this is bad,'” Bollwerk told the British newspaper. “People are passing by rats run at people’s feet there are piles of trash on the sidewalk.

The response from its viewers has been huge. Bollwerk, 36, said more than 10,000 people tuned in to watch the rats. The tour guide, who doesn’t like rats, assured that his intention was encourage the city to come and get rid of the rodents. He appealed to people to complain to the city’s 311 service, and it worked.

“We probably had 100 complaints in one night at this place, and the city ended up coming to get rid of the rats on the construction site,” said the guide, who has more than 235,000 followers on TikTok.

Bollwerk’s free walking tours include destroyed sidewalks and construction sites where rodents crawl under fences and through cracks, as well as restaurants in Sunnyside and Forest Hills where trash is piled up and shacks abandoned for meals outside. They provide shelter for rodents.

In New York, rat populations increased exponentially during the pandemic thanks to the restaurants extended to the sidewalks . The outdoor tables were “designed without a plan to prevent rats from becoming their biggest customers,” said Jessica Tisch, commissioner of the city’s sanitation department, earlier this month.

There were more than 60,000 rat activity reports across the city in 2022, a staggering 102% increase from 2021, according to data from the Department of Health. So far in 2023, more than 39,000 reports have been registered.