UPDATE: Tales of Frustration From One of the UWS’ Most Rat-Infested Blocks: ‘Nobody Is Taking Accountability’

UPDATE: Thursday, May 22 at 4 p.m.: On Thursday, Councilmember Shaun Abreu penned a letter to the New York City Department of Health titled, “Urgent Request for Expanded Rat Mitigation on West 109th Street and the Upper West Side.”

“Still, too many areas are being left behind in this fight [against rodents]. West 109th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam is one of them,” Abreu wrote. “Despite being among the worst-hit blocks on the Upper West Side — with the highest volume of 311 rat complaints over the last year, as reported by West Side Rag — it has not received the level of coordinated, sustained intervention that residents deserve.”

“That’s why I’m urging DSNY to expand its containerization pilot to include West 109th Street and adjacent blocks on the Upper West Side,” he added. “We need to treat this as the crisis that it is.”

You can read Abreu’s full letter — HERE.

We will update this story if there is response from the city.

By Gus Saltonstall

No street on the Upper West Side has logged more rat complaints with 311 over the past year than West 109th Street, with the vast majority of them recorded in the stretch between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.

According to city data, residents have called 311 with 144 rat complaints for that block since May 21 of last year.

“I see rats every night,” Joyce Goodman, who has lived on West 109th between Broadway and Amsterdam for more than 30 years, told West Side Rag when we visited the block on Monday. “If you go out in the morning, the rats are everywhere,” Goodman said. “The place is wild with rats.”

Added Goodman: “At least 50 percent of the tree beds on the sidewalk between Broadway and Amsterdam have open, obvious rat holes.”

“The garbage is overflowing,” Goodman continued. “The bins will be open, both inside and outside of the buildings. Lots of times it’s not put in containers at all.”

On that same stretch of West 109th, multiple trash bins can be seen that have been chewed through by rats.

West Side Rag visited the street with Goodman and others who live there before a block association meeting on Monday around 6:30 p.m. Although it was still light out, we saw seven rats in the span of an hour.

That did not count the flattened rat corpse we spotted in the middle of the road.

Goodman, along with fellow longtime resident of the block Robin Litman, created the West 109th Street Block Association this past August. It has more than 100 members in its WhatsApp group. Its main goal is to solve the block’s rat problem.

“People come home and you know you’re going to deal with a rat if you come after dark,” Litman told the Rag. “Nobody is being active, not the city or the building management. They know there is a problem, but they are not pursuing a way to solve it, or even communicating how we can help more.”

“The rats have been a problem on this block for years,” Litman added.

Forming the block association was the easy part, but figuring out who is responsible for the rat problem, and who in the city can help solve it, has proved frustrating, according to the 109th Street residents.

Specifically, which party was responsible for mending the rodent burrowing holes in the sidewalk tree pits.

While some stakeholders in attendance on Monday night believed it was the New York City Parks Department’s responsibility, a spokesperson from the city agency told the Rag that it does “not perform rodent abatement in tree pits adjacent to non-Parks property.” The spokesperson added that “property owners are generally responsible for the care and maintenance of the adjacent perimeter of their property.”

Vada Properties, which owns 22 rental buildings along West 109th Street, did not respond to the Rag’s request for comment, but we did get information from the management company of multiple addresses on the block, Nieuw Amsterdam.

On Monday evening, an employee of Nieuw Amsterdam who identified himself as Raul, arrived on the street where residents were gathering for the block association meeting later that night.  Raul, who also lives on the street, had seen fliers for the meeting and wanted to speak with tenants.

When asked by the Rag if he thought there was a rat issue on the block, Raul responded, “Yes, there is. It’s something that we all need to work together to fix — tenants and management.”

Raul then told the group that building management has covered holes and entry points that rats use to get into the buildings. “I know there are also rats inside the building and we are trying to treat those with our pest companies,” he said. “On the outside, we are going to put the mesh under the dirt starting next week, and then cover it back up.”

The Rag also reached out to Nieuw Amsterdam Property Management. In an email, a spokesperson for the property management company said the firm “has not received any tenant complaints regarding rodent activity within the building, nor have we received any violations from the Department of Sanitation.” As for areas outside the buildings, the spokesperson said that over the past year, “we proactively invested in upgrading our waste management infrastructure, including enhanced trashcans and platforms.”

Multiple residents of 109th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam insisted on Monday night that they had launched multiple complaints about rodents both inside and outside of the building, but rarely received a response from management.

“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,” the spokesperson added.

A different resident of the block, Devon Morera, spoke to the frustration of no group seemingly taking accountability for the rats on the street.

“I’m frustrated. It seems like there is always a shifting of who is responsible for the rat issue and nobody is taking accountability or acknowledging that everybody has some responsibility in fixing it,” Morera told the Rag.

Multiple residents on Monday night mentioned that there were rats inside buildings on the block, especially in the basement, and the property management’s statement also seemed to contradict the Parks Department response to the Rag that property managers “are generally responsible” for the adjacent perimeter of their property.

Vada Properties did not return the Rag’s request for comment.

There was one new sign of hope to point to on the street.

In recent months, new high-tech “empire bins” were installed on 109th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam. When these bins were installed during a pilot program in West Harlem, rat sightings fell by as much as 55%. That pilot program has now been expanded to Community District 9, which ends at 110th Street to the south, but certain schools on the Upper West Side are also getting the bins — including the P.S. 165 Robert Simon School on the south side of West 109th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam. The new bins have key cards and can only be used by the school, though.

Litman and Goodman said their next goal for the 109th Street Block Association was to organize a meeting that included representatives from the building ownership side of operations, and from different city agency offices.

“We want to get every stakeholder in the same room,” Goodman emphasized.

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