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.)
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2012-04-06 06:58 pm (UTC)M