Joseph Mitchell reports on the millions of rats in New York, and how they got here, from 1944. “Rats,” he wrote, “are almost as fecund as germs.”
In New York, as in all great seaports, rats abound. One is occasionally in their presence without being aware of it. In the whole city relatively few blocks are entirely free of them. 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. During a war, the rat populations of seaports and of ships always shoot up.
There are three kinds of rats in the city—the black , which is also known as the ship or the English rat; the Alexandrian , which is also known as the roof or the Egyptian rat; and the brown , which is also known as the house, gray, sewer, or Norway rat. In recent years they have been killed here in the approximate proportion of ninety brown to nine black and one Alexandrian. The brown is hostile to the other kinds; it usually attacks them on sight.
“Insects, particularly the cockroach and the bedbug, are the No. 1 exterminating problem in New York. Rats come next. Then mice. Perhaps I shouldn’t tell this, but most good exterminators despise rat jobs because they know that exterminating by itself is ineffective. You can kill all the rats in a building on a Monday and come back on a Wednesday and find it crawling with them. The only way rats can be kept out is to rat-proof the building from sub-basement to skylight.
The brown rat is distributed all over the five boroughs. It customarily nests at or below street level—under floors, in rubbishy basements, and in burrows. There are many brownstones and redbricks, as well as many commercial structures, in the city that have basements or sub-basements with dirt floors; these places are rat heavens. The brown rat can burrow into the hardest soil, even tightly packed clay, and it can tunnel through the kind of cheap mortar that is made of sand and lime.
So far, in the United States, the plague has been only a menace. From 1898 to 1923, 10,822,331 deaths caused by the plague were recorded in India alone; in the United States, in this period, there were fewer than three hundred deaths. The plague first occurred in this country in 1900, in the Chinatown of San Francisco. It is generally believed that the bacteria were brought in by a herd of infected rats that climbed to the docks from an old ship in the Far Eastern trade.