![]() When he does, it is a disquieting experience. They are least cautious in the two or three hours before dawn, and they are encountered most often by milkmen, night watchmen, scrubwomen, policemen, and other people who are regularly abroad in those hours. A month or so ago, in broad daylight, on the street in front of a riding academy on the West Side, a stableboy tried to kill a rat with a mop it darted up the mop handle and tore the thumbnail off the boy’s left hand. They are able to run right up a cane or a broomstick and inflict deep, gashlike bites on their assailant’s hands. They fight savagely and blindly, in the manner of mad dogs If hemmed in, and sometimes if too suddenly come upon, they will attack. They will severely bite babies (there was an epidemic of this a year or so ago in a row of tenements in the Wallabout neighborhood in Brooklyn), and they will bite sleeping adults, but ordinarily they flee from people. Īway from their nests, they are usually on the edge of hysteria. Shortly after the trucks have made their pick-ups, if no people are stirring, the rats appear and search for dropped scraps they seem to pop out of the air. The scow-shaped trucks that collect kitchen scraps from restaurants, night clubs, and saloons all over Manhattan for the pig farms of Secaucus, New Jersey, roll into these streets at that time. The rats come out by twos and threes in some side streets in the theatrical district practically every morning around four-thirty. Herds have been seen on autumn nights scuttering across Fifth Avenue. Īfter the first cold snap they begin to migrate, hunting for warm basements. There are great colonies of this kind of rat in Central Park. In the spring and summer, multitudes of one species, the brown rat, live in twisting, many-chambered burrows in vacant lots and parks. There are old rat paths beneath the benches in at least two ferry sheds. They nest in the roofs of some “L” stations and many live in crannies in the subways in the early-morning hours, during the long lulls between trains, they climb to the platforms and forage among the candy-bar wrappers and peanut hulls. Department of Health inspectors have found their claw and tail tracks in the basements of some of the best restaurants in the city. They also turn up in more surprising places. The biggest rat colonies in the city are found in rundown structures on or near the waterfront, especially in tenements, live-poultry markets, wholesale produce markets, slaughterhouses, warehouses, stables, and garages. They have diminished greatly in the last twenty-five years, but there still are millions here some authorities believe that in the five boroughs there is a rat for every human being. In the whole city relatively few blocks are entirely free of them. One is occasionally in their presence without being aware of it. In New York, as in all great seaports, rats abound. ![]()
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