Rats attack ritzy NYC block that’s home to doctors, professors — chewing up cars, trash bins and playgrounds: ‘Valley of the Rats’
A vermin invasion has turned a ritzy Upper West Side block into “The Valley of the Rats.”
Residents are afraid to venture out at night because of the horror-movie-sized rodents along the elite stretch of West 109th Street — where doctors and professors live and boxing legend Floyd Mayweather owns more than a dozen buildings.
The critters chew their way into cars, gnaw through trash bins and scurry around the local playground, residents said.
“I need to move out, because I can’t live in fear,” said Ankita Brahmaroutu, 31, a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University Irving Medical Center who has lived on the block for about a year.
“I’ve been so scared to go outside sometimes, I’ll just take an Uber to the subway because I don’t want to walk down the street,” Brahmaroutu said. “Our sense of community has been lost because of the rats … you used to see a lot more people (outside) with their dominoes tables.”
One 40-year-old resident who grew up on the block between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue said locals aren’t able to “walk on the sidewalk.
“They’re eating us up,” she said. “Even when you’re home, you hear people screaming when they see a rat.
“It’s embarrassing when you bring visitors over,” she added. “And you have to go through what I call ‘The Valley of the Rats.'”
Under-siege residents have logged 311 complaints with little change so they’ve now created a neighborhood group called the West 109th Street Block Association to fight against the vermin invasion by filling tree beds taken over by the rats.
“I don’t like to go out at night,” added Emily Horowitz, a 20-year block veteran, “because it’s not one or two rats once in a while: it’s a siege of rats.”
Horowitz, 49, said two dead rats were recently left decomposing on the sidewalk – near the local intermediate school – for roughly a week before they were cleaned up earlier this month. The rodent residents have become so emboldened that they’ve even brought chewed-up toothbrushes and scratched Capri Sun pouches on her window ledge, she said.
Locals said the street has been rat-filled for decades, but they have noticed a surge in sightings during the pandemic when regular visitors from exterminators were suspended.
COVID-19 budget cuts also resulted in less trash pick-ups and alternate side parking reductions, which blocked sweepers’ ability to thoroughly clean the streets, according to a
Some plastic composting bins, which debuted last year and are picked up weekly, are also entirely chewed-through on West 109th Street. Trash left out on the curbside is a feast for the uptown rats, The Post observed during a visit.
The 311 data appears to agree: Residential complaints over rat sightings in Community Board 7, which encompasses the Upper West Side, are up 4.3% compared to this time last year.
A sanitation department rep told The Post that the city’s latest waste contamination pilot program in Hamilton Heights – featuring huge spaceship-like Empire Bins – is the perfect solution to squashing the block’s rat problem.
The containerization effort – in which all waste was put in locked bins – resulted in a 60% drop in rat sightings, the rep said, but West 109th Street narrowly missed the pilot program by being
“Millions of New Yorkers are using containers for trash and food waste, and we are not seeing any widespread accounts of rats getting into them – they are working here, just like they work around the world,” sanitation spokesperson Vincent Gragnani told The Post.
Nevertheless, the city has still issued 30 trash-related summonses on the block this year alone, ranging from setting out trash too early to dirty sidewalk conditions.
The on-site management company for Mayweather’s buildings — bought up last year as part of a $402 million deal including more than 60 buildings — said none of the properties have logged resident complaints about rats, or have they received any violations from the city.
Nieuw Amsterdam Property Management has spent more than $100,000 this year to replace its metal garbage bins with portable garbage cans and plug rat holes on the properties, a source familiar with the matter said. The management team also hired a new cleaning service and exterminator – which makes monthly visits as well as services at tenants’ requests – as of last summer.
“The observation of rodents outside the building suggests that the issue is external to our property, and what measures are taken to keep public sidewalks and streets clean are outside of our control,” a spokesperson for the property manager added.
