Rat Wars
NW-A30Between April and September 2009, photographer Sha Ribeiro patiently laid in wait with his Rolleiflex camera in the alleyways of downtown Manhattan, tempting his subjects with baked goods. The result is Greed, a series of photographs that frame rats as a metaphor for hunger, money and power in New York.
In the long-running guerrilla war of rats versus New York City, the rats appear to be winning. Recent salvos from the city government late last year were bellicose. “The rats are absolutely going to hate this announcement,” said sanitation commissioner Jessica Tisch at a press conference in October 2022. “But the rats don’t run this city – we do.” “We are taking the fight to the rats,” added council member Shaun Abreu. “This is not Ratatouille. Rats are not our friends.” New York Mayor Eric Adams nailed his colours to the mast: “We’re going to kill rats.” The city administration subsequently posted an advert for a director of rodent mitigation, offering a salary of up to $170,000 for someone “highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty” who was able to prove their commitment to “wholesale slaughter”.
If the rats got the message, they clearly weren’t intimidated. Since then, rats have continued to run amok. In November 2022, researchers discovered rats living in Brooklyn that tested positive for Covid-19, prompting fears of a zoonotic spillover event. A mild January – the second warmest since records began – kicked off 2023, prompting fears that rats will have more food and more opportunities to mate (their reproductive cycles usually slow in cold weather). In February, viral video footage showed a rat scurrying playfully across the prone body of an unlucky man who risked napping on the subway. Perhaps most humiliating of all, that same month, Mayor Adams was dinged with a $300 fine for failing to control a rat problem in a Brooklyn rowhouse of which he is the landlord. So far, the only one to get the drop on rats has been Flaco, the Eurasian eagle owl who escaped from Central Park Zoo in early February and appears to be surviving on the lam via a diet of New York rodent.
To be fair to the mayor, it is fiendishly tricky to get rid of rats.[1] You can try to trap them, but they are notoriously neophobic – extremely distrustful of anything new in their environment – so exterminators have to leave traps out for days before returning to bait them (some professionals swear by the allure of bacon grease). You can try and bump them off with bait boxes laced with an anticoagulant such as Warfarin; however, not only is that an extremely cruel and protracted way to kill a rat, but it is also becoming ineffective, as the animals are developing resistance to these poisons.[2] You can try and block up their rat holes, one at a time, but they can chew through pretty much anything – desperate pest controllers have resorted to a mix of concrete and glass. Meanwhile, extermination service Rentokil has started investing in high-tech solutions with the acquisition of Israeli pest-control firm Eitan Amichai IPM, bringing artificial intelligence to the rat wars. Its new surveillance service promises to utilise facial recognition to identify problem rodents. Rentokil chief executive Adam Ransom was quoted in the Financial Times saying he was confident his business would thrive, even in a recession. “The pest control industry is biblical in nature,” he said. “The rats don’t read the FT.”
Rats are a headache for urban design. They can run faster than a human, jump up to 20 times their own height, shimmy up drainpipes and easily climb any vertical surface that gives them enough grip. No architect could design a totally rat-proof building. Evolved to burrow, their tubular, flexible bodies can squeeze through gaps smaller than an inch. They live underground – in burrows, in old tunnels, in the sewers – and come out to eat at night, guided by sense memory. In the 1920s, scientists pitched the concept of constructing a wall around New York’s harbour front to keep the rats out, but the idea was abandoned for its impracticality. The construction industry is hard pressed to foil a determined rat. Their teeth score 5.5 on Mohr’s scale of hardness, making them tougher than iron. Their cartoonish yellow incisors grow at a rate of five inches a year and they have muscular jaws that give them a bite force of 6,000 psi (pounds per square inch), around twice that of a crocodile. Rats are myomorphs, which means they have evolved to both chew and gnaw. Their teeth spread as they bite, and a handy flap of skin plugs their throat as they gnaw to prevent them from swallowing debris. As such, an inexhaustive list of things rats can chew through includes wood, bricks, concrete, drywall, and rusted metal.
Pest-control experts and rodentologists agree: the only way to control a population of rats is to remove their food source. You must design rats out of the system of the city through rat-proofing and exclusion. For all the sabre-rattling at New York’s October press conference, commissioner Tisch spoke some sense when she declared that “the biggest swing that you can take in cleaning up our streets is to shut down the all-night, all-you-can-eat rat buffet.” This wasn’t just an empty threat: the mayor’s office followed it up with legislation stipulating that, from 1 April 2023, homes and businesses can’t put their rubbish bags out on the curb until 8 o’clock in the evening.[3] The New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY) can also insist that a business put its refuse in rat-proof bins if it gets more than two rat complaints.
Which begs the question: why isn’t New York using rat-proof bins in the first place? As a design solution, it seems obvious. A futuristic, pneumatic-tube trash system has been operating on Roosevelt Island since 1975,[4] sucking waste away at 30mph, but the rest of the city’s trash collection is open air. The public litter bins are currently green metal mesh cans that are basically a climbing frame for rats.[5] While residences in New York are technically required by the City to put their trash in a trashcan with a fitted lid, you can also simply toss it onto the curb in a heavy-duty black plastic bag for DSNY sanitation workers to collect. According to government information hub NYC311: “There is no limit to the number of bags you can put out for collection.”
A plastic bag is but an appetiser to a concrete-chomping rat, and once the bags are out and the sun has set, the nocturnal rats are free to chow down. Commercial businesses, which are not served by the DSNY but must rather contract private trash hauliers, can also simply set their bagged-up non-recyclable waste on the curb. Paris – home to Remy, Ratatouille’s protagonist – introduced waste containerisation in 1884 when the lawyer Eugène-René Poubelle, Prefect of the Seine, legislated that every building owner must provide their residents with three covered boxes for sorting and storing their refuse. Although landlords grumbled at the cost, the concept persisted and became so widespread that the French word for bin is “poubelle”. Almost 140 years later, New York City is now trialling its own waste-containerisation scheme.
The Citibin is the new weapon in the arsenal of the Clean Curbs programme, first heralded by the DSNY in 2020 as a plan to “get the clutter of garbage bags off city sidewalks and away from hungry rodents”. Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and Community Based Development Organisations (CBDOs) can apply for a $20,000 grant to purchase and maintain a sealed container that can sit on City property – that is, the street. Each Citibin has been designed as an anti-rat fortress. “It was about creating an aluminium box that rats couldn’t get into and making it look good,” Liz Picarazzi, the founder of Citibin, tells me over Zoom from her Brooklyn home. “Everything is welded and bent so that no rats can get in.” The lockable containers do have ventilation holes – to prevent the overwhelming stink of bin juice building up inside – but they are small enough that no rat shall pass.
Technically a rat could take on aluminium, given enough time, but the idea is that a Citibin would not be worth the effort. “They don’t hang around there for days and days trying to get into something. They figure out pretty quickly that this is no longer a food source, and they leave,” says Picarazzi. A phalanx of Citibins were installed in April 2022 as part of a year-long pilot programme for the Times Square Alliance BID at the intersections of 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue, and 41st Street and Seventh Avenue. “New Yorkers, you want clean streets; you want trash off our sidewalks,” said Mayor Adams at the grand unveiling of the bins. “You’re tired of the rodents, you’re tired of the smell, you’re tired of seeing food, waste and spillage.” A subsequent residential pilot installation of six Citibins has been added on 45th Street. It’s an exciting moment for Picarazzi. “Times Square was our very first [municipal] installation, which for a still somewhat young or small company was a huge deal,” she explains. “It really put us on the map.”
Citibin did not start out as the premier siege weapon in the rat war. Instead, its design grew out of more domestic desires. “We had a lot of clients in New York City who had trash cans in front of their otherwise very lovely homes,” says Picarazzi, whose first business, Checklist Home Services, is a handyman company. “Not a good look when you have people coming in as real estate agents for showings to sell the house or apartment. It really came out of a need to basically contain and hide an eyesore.” With a supply of handymen on tap, she began in 2012 making stylish containers that could disguise unsightly trash receptacles and even double as planters. Not only did homes become more marketable, Picarazzi realised that their bins could double up as package storage for the never-ending stream of online shopping deliveries.
But when Covid-19 shut down the city, the residential bins took on a new purpose. “Business really picked up after the pandemic started,” says Picarazzi. “It had to do with the decreased trash pickup and collection by the Department of Sanitation, which then created a buffet for rats.” As restaurants closed during lockdown, the rats’ usual supply ran out. “They became desperate rats,” she says. People stayed at home, cooking and ordering in food, and there was a resultant rodent migration. “The rats moved from primarily public areas with lots of restaurants, to residential places that may not have had rats before.” With more and more requests for rat-proof bins, she began to notice the sheer scale of New York City’s symbiotic trash-and-rat issue. “It’s astounding that as New Yorkers, we don’t even see that as a big deal,” she says. “But then tourists come in and think, ‘I’m not gonna go to that restaurant, they’ve got 80 bags of trash right next to the outdoor dining area’.”
When the DSNY let out its Clean Curb hue and cry, Picarazzi pounced like a rat on a binbag. “I zeroed in on that like no one else would have, because I knew that’s what I do for a living,” she says. “Like, hello, I’m Brooklyn based, I’m a woman, I’ve been doing this for years. There is, quite frankly, no one better qualified to containerise the trash than Citibin, because we’ve been doing it all over New York City.” So, in a reverse of the hungry pandemic rats’ journey, Citibin moved to the centre. “Moving from residential to municipalities is a huge jump for us,” says Picarazzi. “It creates new design needs. Because the user is not a residential home owner, the user is a New York City sanitation worker, who is really strong and is trying to move as fast as they can.” Citibin has had to adapt to the vast and complex system that is the DSNY. “It’s kind of exciting, but it’s also a little terrifying,” says Picarazzi. “Because it’s no longer someone’s home. It’s a city, and not only any city, it’s the city of New York.”
Founded in 1881, the DSNY is the largest sanitation department in the world. More than 7,000 of its sanitation workers[6] hold back the tide of detritus that would otherwise clog the city. They clean the streets, shovel the snow, collect the recycling – and take out the trash. Their motto – “New York’s Strongest” – isn’t an empty brag: each sanitation worker picks up an estimated five tonnes of garbage to throw into their trucks every shift. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US. While Citibins may keep the rats at bay, for a sanitation worker they are an added layer of difficulty in an already difficult job, so Picarazzi feels the pressure to get it right. “Every bit of hardware and fastening, the siding, the cladding that we use, we are adjusting,” she says. It’s the kind of R&D department most industrial designers could only dream of. “We get real-time feedback from them while they’re using the product. We haven’t had a test kitchen in the same way that we’re getting with this. It’s enabled us to innovate very quickly.”
The biggest design hurdle is the Citibin’s lock system. To put the bins on the streets, the DSNY stipulated that the containers need to be lockable, so Citibin has been trialling four types of lock to see which suits the sanitation workers best: a three-button digital combination padlock; a keyed padlock; a keyed T-latch lock (the kind used for utility vehicles and boats); and an electronic solution requiring a battery that’s still in development. “The lock needs for residential are pretty much non-existent unless someone really wants to lock their trash,” says Picarazzi. “In the city, it’s an absolute necessity to have a lock for a lot of safety reasons.” Bins are an arson magnet; someone has already tried to set fire to one of the Times Square Citibins, but the fire department put it out quickly. On a darker note, the locks are there to keep people experiencing homelessness out. New York is the richest city in the world thanks to the 345,600 millionaires who call it home, yet more than 68,800 of its citizens slept in its homeless shelters on any given night in December 2022. [7] The lack of affordable housing in the city is considered one of the primary reasons for this. [8] That a square metal box with a roof would be an attractive place to shelter is a far more damning indictment of the city’s governance than its rat issue.
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At war with rats, we are really at war with ourselves. “I think of rats as our mirror species,” writes Robert Sullivan in his book Rats: A Year with New York’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants. We walk the streets while they tunnel beneath it. We eat and procreate and create mounds of garbage so rats can eat and procreate and create problems for us. They have grown with us so symbiotically that they now prefer our effluvia to any other food source. “It is written in the rat literature that a rat would starve in an alley surrounded by raw vegetables,” reports Sullivan. They eschew potato peelings, raw carrots and apples, but go wild for scrambled egg, macaroni and cheese, and fried chicken. Rats sleep in soft nests lined with our discarded, shredded-up plastic bags. They also easily rival human fertility – top shaggers that can copulate up to 20 times a day and are able to conceive as soon as they have given birth. “When they arrive as immigrants to a newfound land, rats push out the creatures that have proceeded them,” Sullivan writes. Rattus norvegicus [9] arrived on America’s shores, likely through New York’s ports, in the first year of the Revolutionary War and by 1926 they were in every state: a “manifest infestation”.
Mayor Adams is the latest in a long line of politicians, media barons and activists who have taken up the banner of the crusade against rats. They are the bogeyman that serves a multitude of goals to unite people against a furry other. In 1946, Mayor William O’Dwyer appointed a citywide rat specialist, announcing: “Something must be done”. Harlem tenant organiser Jesse Gray used rats to great effect in 1963 for a rent strike, instructing aggrieved tenants to “bring a rat to court!” Residents complied with gusto, bringing rats both alive and dead to lay at the feet of the judges of the New York City Court. The Daily News declared “ALL OUT WAR ON RATS” in 1965, paying teenagers to train in rat extermination and handing out bait boxes at “rat stations”. The front pages blared: “THIS IS IT! WE PASS AMMO TO TROOPS OF THE ANTI-RAT WAR. WAR IS ON!” In 1967, Gray took a leaf out of his own book and brought a rat to Congress as his supporters chanted “Rats cause riots”. President Richard Nixon tried to cut federal rat-control funding in 1972, but quickly U-turned after vocal criticism. In 1997, Mayor Rudolph Guiliani employed his own rat tsar in response to a protest against rat infestations held at City Hall – and a rat sighting on the porch of his official residence. People chanted “One rat, two rat, three rats, four. Everywhere I look there’s more and more”, as Guiliani assured his citizens: “We make unprecedented efforts to kill rats.”
War and death cast a long shadow over Rats. Much of Sullivan’s ratting field research was conducted in the spring of 2001, in an alleyway a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center. A few months later, terrorists flew two hijacked planes into the Twin Towers. As rescue workers picked through the toxic rubble, the Department of Health moved in to clear food from abandoned restaurants within the exclusion zone lest the rats discover a new source of food before the dust had settled. The city’s rodent-control department lined the perimeter of the disaster with poison bait boxes. A crew of exterminators was employed full-time to safeguard at least one empty office block near Ground Zero. Published in 2004, Sullivan’s book came out in an America that had just invaded Iraq. Conflict, rats and patriotism are braided together as tightly as the tails of the legendary rat king;[10] it’s hard to see where one begins and the other ends.
It was an earlier global conflict that instigated the work of David E. Davis, described by Sullivan as the “founding father of modern rat studies”. During the Second World War, the US government founded the Rodent Ecology Project, which employed Davis, out of fears that Nazi Germany would weaponise rats. “Officials feared that enemies of the USA would wage germ warfare by using rats as vectors to spread the plague,” writes Christine Keiner in her paper ‘Wartime rat control, rodent ecology, and the rise and fall of chemical rodenticides’. Little was known about rat biology at the time, and blockades had stymied the import of biological pesticides, prompting the US Office of Scientific Research and Development to fund research into chemical alternatives. While initially effective, these new poisons didn’t work in the long term. “As the rat population resurged, it became clear that controlling rats required much more than exposing them to toxic chemicals,” explains Keiner. “Experience has demonstrated that it is futile to endeavor to eliminate rats by poisoning alone,” admits a paper titled ‘Rodent Control Requires Widespread Understanding and Participation’ published in Baltimore Health News in 1947. “An alteration of the rat’s environment so he will have no place to eat or live is the first essential step in effective control measures.”
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The Citibin pilot is one such environmental alteration; the best offence in the New York City rat wars is a good defence. But patriotism can only go so far – delivering waste containerisation on this scale requires a globalised economy. At first, Citibins were made in factories in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New York State. The expense was crippling, design collaboration was lacking, and transporting the finished product was painfully slow. “I couldn’t have been a profitable business if I stayed in the US,” says Picarazzi. Reluctantly, she began to explore options with Chinese factories. “I went over there. I toured with a bunch of factories. I was very impressed with their engineering capabilities. My work with China has been very collaborative. Even though we don’t speak the same language, when I go over there, we will stand around the product for hours, talking through options and different hardware.”
It was markedly different from her experience with US factories. “It was never like that [here]. I would give my requirements to the factory, we’d have a little bit of conversation, then they would produce it. Oftentimes, it would cost more and it would take longer. When I was shipping from China, I could get those goods faster than when I trucked it from Connecticut, which is a state that is completely touching New York.” Still, Picarazzi felt guilty for not patronising domestic firms, so in 2021 she tried again, sending out requests for proposals to factories all over the US. But the costs were 67 per cent higher and completely unfeasible. The American Dream of a successful product-design business reluctantly requires an international effort. “I have found that I have been able to iterate and innovate faster with my Chinese factory than I ever was able to do in the US,” she says. “As an American, I hate that.”
Iteration and innovation will be key to the success of the Citibin scheme. Maintenance is crucial, and each container gets swept out by cleaning contractors three times a week, and power-washed several times a month. Still, the switch from residential to commercial rubbish took its toll on the composite panels of bamboo and recycled plastic that clad the aluminium sides. Intended as an aesthetic addition (and as another layer of rat deterrent), the original cladding proved no match for bin juice. “Overfull, leaky Times Square trash bins grossing out locals and tourists alike,” blared a headline in the New York Post from July 2022. Times Square Alliance acknowledged it had overfilled the bins and promised to up collection times. Picarazzi vowed to take the feedback on board, drawing up plans for a drainage system, while the panels were swapped out for darker tones. A couple of panels also needed replacing after the arson attack.
Picarazzi is now considering updating the dimensions of the bins, not just so they can hold more waste (they can currently hold 180 of the 600 or so bags of rubbish produced in the Times Square vicinity every day) but also to placate New York City’s notoriously agitated drivers. “One public complaint is the Citibin has taken parking spots,” says Picarazzi. “People here are very protective of parking. And, for instance, on 45th Street, the pilot takes up six parking spots, which is a pretty big deal.” It’s one of the many benefits of the year-long pilot programme says Picarazzi, that they can take this kind of feedback into account. “If they were to roll this out [citywide], we would develop a different size. It’s a learning.”
Parking gripes and the stinky summer incident aside, the feedback from the public has been glowing. “We were there a couple of weeks ago, and someone walking their dog said, ‘I never used to walk my dog on 45th Street. And now I come here on purpose,’” enthuses Picarazzi. While the hounds of Manhattan may be sad that their smelly curbside snack trays are gone, the grateful owners are delighted. By taking piles of bags off the curb, the Citibins have also improved the accessibility of the area’s streets. “Strollers and wheelchairs cannot get through sidewalks that have bags on them like that,” says Picarazzi. “So we see now that there are strollers going up and down, there are school kids walking from their school to the playground, without trash all around them.”
As for feedback from the rats? Picarazzi will have to wait and see, as rodents are somewhat harder to voxpop. The DSNY has been monitoring the pilot site, checking for rats and their droppings, and will produce a report at the end of the programme. “[One] reason the city picked that block is that it had a horrible rat infestation – it’s designated as rat danger zone on their heat maps,” says Picarazzi. “In the 10 years we’ve been installing Citibins, we’ve never even once heard of a rat problem. So I’m hoping that the measurements [from the pilot] are going to show the same.” Whatever New York City decides, the Citibin is spreading its wings. Picarazzi is already rolling out the product in Boston and Philadelphia, and is in talks with the city of Chicago.
But while Citibins may win the battle, the rats will continue to win the war if human behaviour doesn’t fundamentally change. New York City produces 14m tonnes of waste every year, the vast majority of it heading to landfill or incineration. According to the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, one-third of this is food waste, yet only 3.3 million of the city’s 8.5 million human population is served by its curbside organics recycling scheme. If rats are our mirror species, thriving on our consumption, the portrait they reflect back isn’t pretty. The design challenge posed by the required behavioural and systematic change towers higher than any pile of garbage bags.
1 Rat populations are huge in the popular imagination thanks to an oft-repeated but wildly exaggerated statistic that there are 8m rats in New York, almost one for every person. A 2014 study by statistician Jonathan Auerbach took up the challenge of a rat census. “Animals are terrible survey respondents,” writes Auerbach, while a capture-recapture methodology wouldn’t appeal to government authorities who were “unlikely to approve a large-scale rat-releasing experiment (I know, because I asked)”. By charting lots with repeat reported rat sightings, Auerbach came up with the estimate that there are 2m rats in the city.
2 Also, if a poisoned rat staggers back to your house and dies in the walls or under the floorboards, the smell is ungodly and the ensuing fly infestation will have you calling for an exorcism rather than an exterminator. Trust me.
3 Previously it was 4 o’clock. So that’s four less hours at the all-you-can-eat rat buffet, but hardly starvation rations.
4 Built by Swedish company Envac back in the 1970s and recently upgraded in 2019 to the tune of $1.7m, the Automated Vacuum Assisted Compacting (AVAC) system is one of just two in the US. The other is located underneath Walt Disney World in Florida.
5 This could be about to change. Design studio Group Project won the BetterBin competition held by the Department of Sanitation in 2019 to redesign the city’s mesh bins. Its lightweight, modular bins, which feature sanitation-worker friendly ergonomic handles, are currently in production, but are yet to hit the streets at the time of writing.
6 John DeLury, president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association and leader of the infamous 1968 strike that saw 100,000 tonnes of rubbish pile up on New York’s streets, insisted on the more respectful title of sanitation worker for his comrades. “If you want to get me mad, call us ‘garbage men’,” he told The Harvard Crimson in 1972.
7 According to New York’s Department for Housing (DHS) daily census reports.
8 According to a 2019 report from the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness (ICPH).
9 The Latin name, which means Norway rat, is a misnomer. John Berkenhout christened the brown rat in 1769 in his text Outlines of the Natural History of Great Britain, but while rats reached British shores in 1728, they didn’t get to Norway until 1768. They probably came over to the UK from Denmark.
10 A rat king is a group of rats whose tails have become entangled together. Typically, purported discoveries of alleged rat kings are the purview of cryptozoologists, while zoologists remain skeptical as to whether they are a real phenomenon, and instead view them as a creepy hoax. The idea of a mass of conjoined rats has been fertile ground for horror writers, at least.
Words India Block
Photographs Sha Ribeiro
This article was originally published in Disegno #35. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.