3:00 snapshot #941:More New York City

[urbpan]

The second two days of the Rodent Control Academy were held in the building I'm leaning in front of, a City Government Administrative building of some kind way way down on the southwest tip of Manhattan. It was cold and foggy in the mornings (even as the temp got up to the 80s in Boston) but when it burned off there was quite a view. Here's the balance of my NYC pics, including a couple that I took while doing Rodent Control fieldwork:



This was the view from the classroom window: the Hudson River through the notch, and a couple green roofs.


Down in Battery Park, where I ate my lunch, you could see the Statue of Liberty through the fog.


While doing fieldwork in Battery Park, we noticed the drag marks from trash bags. (These usually contain grease, and can serve as a food supply for rats.)


We also did field observations at Trinity Church. Heavy rat infestations in the graveyard made one workshop participant say that he wanted to be buried in a stainless steel casket.


On my way back to the bus station, I stopped by to see the new World Trade Center tower.


I was in a bit of a hurry, so I didn't explore this place, which I only learned afterward was the Irish Hunger Memorial.

Thanks New York! I promise I'll be back soon to think about and experience more than your rat problem.

Comments

[uneko.livejournal.com]

Awesome, as always :D
I have questions though.. is it the grease trails themselves that act as a food source or the bags of trash? I started envisioning rats flocking onto the side walk licking it frantically. XD

and on the list of questions I might not ant to know the answer to.... what do rats in the cemetery eat? D:

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

The rats do indeed lick the sidewalk! Mostly they make use of the trash itself, but will happily lick grease from the pavement if that's what's available. The rats in the cemetery feed on food that people drop (a lot of people eat lunch nearby) and from bags of trash on the sidewalk near the church.

The biggest problem is that trash in New York is mostly placed directly on the sidewalk in bags, not in cans or dumpsters, so it is readily available to the rats.

[bosoxmom.livejournal.com]

Very nice pictures!!

You would think that putting trash in a proper receptacle would be standard procedure at this point in time......

don't want rats, clean up your trash etc....

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Strangely (due to lack of space and funding) there aren't a lot of dumpsters in New York, and very few trash barrels. On the sidewalk is legal and normal. But you're right--they fix the trash problem and they are well on the way to fixing the rat problem.

[weofodthignen]

Umm, don't be so sure. They will always eat in vacant lots and ruined buildings, on dirty sidewalks and in gutters, and from the corner trashcans themselves (which can only realistically be emptied once or twice a day), and the subway is swarming with them despite best efforts with poisoning; good shelter down there, as the tunnel people could tell you, and all the more so when you can scurry in the trackbed with impunity. The trash bags on sidewalks thing is the way the trash removal guys and the noise monitors both wanted it. Bags are easier for the removal guys to lift - there isn't space for the lifting arms used in suburbia - and don't make as much noise. It's in fact something of a miracle that the trash gets collected in Manhattan and much of Brooklyn and the Bronx - there are those of us who remember when it habitually didn't, in the 70s, and I wonder if they ever got the recycling working properly in the Bronx? When I left, recycling collection there was still only alternate weeks. Yes, the rats can be bad. They are bad in Central Park, too. I knew someone who was bitten on the ankle going down into Rector Street subway station on the 1, 9 (you were near there, possibly in the other part of the building I used to teach in). But ... rats are the main trigger of my asthma, and my asthma was better in NYC than anywhere else I've lived. The rats and the humans can almost always avoid interfering with each others' lives. (That person stepped on the rat.)

M