The weary folks along E. 86th St. from Lexington to Second Aves. were long resigned to an unpleasant problem — a web of over 100 rat burrows dug in 21 tree beds that nightly spawned teeming swarms of the distasteful critters.
Now, there’s buzz about how the rat hordes seem to have almost vanished.
Ibrahim Asmal, who sells candy, sodas and newspapers on the stretch, said the rats sometimes would get inside his stand and cause havoc.
“It was bad here, man,” said the 53-year-old longtime area merchant. “When they get in, they bite things. And then you have to throw things out.”
The city’s knee-jerk response — those black poison bait boxes from the Health Department — functioned about as well as plastic owls. Some rats moved their families into the boxes, converting them from death traps into a kind of inadvertent city-supported housing program.
They built nests in a LinkNYC kiosk next to a cluttered fruit stand, making their home close to their meals. They gnawed their way into storefronts emptied by the pandemic and pending real estate projects.
“We were being inundated with complaints and it just reached epic proportions,” said City Councilwoman Julie Menin (D-Manhattan). “It’s simply not acceptable that people are walking around and rats are proliferating all over.”
The last straw for Upper East Side activist Andrew Fine came in June when a huge rat scrabbled over his sneakers about 4:30 a.m. as he was putting up campaign posters during a primary race.
“There were so many rats. I was trying to take a video, and then a rat ran over my foot. I said, ‘I’m out,'” the real estate agent said.
“I used 311 a million times and it was whack-a-mole. DOH [the Health Department] would bait three or four tree pits. Nothing happened. I even tried digging out the holes.”
Fine, a self-described “squeaky wheel,” turned to the local councilwoman Menin, who set aside roughly $10,000 to hire a specialist with an out-of-the-box solution.
That person turned out to be Matt Deodato — a highly motivated exterminator Fine affectionately calls “Matt the Rat Killer.” His tool of choice? A $3,000 device called a Burrow RX that suffocates rats by pumping carbon monoxide into their burrows.
“When we got the guy with the carbon monoxide, that was a game changer,” Fine said.
The plague of rats in the city has gotten much attention in recent months with rodent sightings reported to 311 climbing in 2022 compared to each of the two previous years.
Mayor Adams has been preoccupied with the larger rat problem — which got personal after health inspectors slapped his Brooklyn rowhouse with rat-based summonses.
Fine describes the device as looking “halfway between a lawnmower and a generator.”
The carbon monoxide is tinted with “smoke oil,” so it will visibly curl out of any burrows connected by tunnels. Deodato said he’s seen the tinted gas go in one burrow and come out in another 30 feet away.
“Within three minutes they die inside the burrow. But sometimes they will come out of the burrow near-death, and we kill them by hand using a hoe or a pitchfork tool,” he says with relish.
“We kill them before they get far. We bury the nest, and if another rat comes along, it will smell the decomposition and stay away.”
Boston, which has suffered a surge in rat sightings, started using the devices last spring. Los Angeles and San Diego uses them for gophers and other common burrowing animals.
Here in the Big Apple, despite its apparent effectiveness the device is not widely deployed. Deodato said he’s only seen one other exterminator employing the machine in New York.
A spokesman for Burrow RX said there are about 20 machines in use in the city, about half by city agencies.
The machines are more effective than poison. “A rat will not eat something it’s unfamiliar with,” said Deodato. “They already are eating seafood, Chinese, Italian from the restaurant garbage, so why would they eat the bait?”
Deodato, 57, grew up in Brooklyn in a family of cops and firefighters. He opted for rat killing and co-founded his own firm, Urban Pest Management. He now has nine employees, including his eldest son.
“This is an industry no one wants to do, but it’s my 39th year in the business and I’ve put two kids through college with a third in high school,” Deodato said.
He attributes the rising rat problem to the isolation of the pandemic and a construction boom around the city that dislodged the rats from their usual habitats into surrounding neighborhoods.
“A rat is going to survive,” he said. “During the pandemic, we thought it would be less, but they thrived because they had free rein.
“Meanwhile, they were binging in outdoor food sheds and nesting in the floorboards.”
Over the months that followed Fine’s encounter last June with the rat that ran across his foot, he, Deodato and his employees set to the challenge of clearing the rat burrows on busy E. 86th St.
And they began to see results. One by one, the Burrow RX cleared the tree beds of rat infestations. Fine got the owner of the two storefronts to secure the properties and block the holes.
“A lot of people just think it’s an impossible problem that will never be solved and I’m just nuts enough to think that we can chase the rats off of 86th St.,” Fine said this week.
“We had 21 infested burrows, one infested kiosk and two infested storefronts, and we’re down to one pesky burrow outside a pizza place on the next block. It’s crazy.”
Fine was acquainted with Mayor Adams from the political campaign, and texted him the news about their success. “I just said we’re really crushing it with the rats on 86th St.,” he said. “So he called and said, ‘Tell me more. How does it work?'”
Menin said the program has expanded to other blocks in the neighborhood and the city is looking at broader use of the device. The Parks Department said Friday it has used the device.
“We saw a near total eradication of the burrows after several rounds of treatment,” Menin said. “People are telling me, ‘I can’t believe it. This was an out-of-the-box solution that has been very successful.”
Deodato said shop owners now emerge to offer candy and coffee and a sandwich or two. And for the newsstand owner Asmal, the change has been a blessing.
“Thank God, I don’t see rats here. It’s wonderful,” he said.
Now, the harder part — making it last.
