Want the authentic New York experience? Take a rat tour!

The classic tourist visits New York ready to climb the Empire State Building, but there are also travelers who come to the Big Apple wanting to see rodents like the one in the picture. Kenny Bollwerk, organizer of "rat routes" for adventurers, summed it up in the New York Post: “Rats are like a New York City mascot.”

What Kenny Bollwerk offers (and shows on the TikTok account called RatTok) are free guided tours of dilapidated areas or construction sites or places with an abundance of garbage where the rat population is absolutely spectacular.

Beyond the anecdote, the reality is that rats are part of the New York landscape. And after the pandemic there has been a population explosion among these rodents. So it is not difficult to spot them.

Calculating the number of rats in New York is complicated but all estimates assume that it is a very high number. In 2014, Business Insider pointed to a figure of two million street rodents, but currently there are media outlets that increase that number to four or even nine million rats.

The problem is serious. In The New York Times, Dodai Stewart wrote an article in April 2023 that compiled terrifying experiences of New Yorkers with rats. For example: "One night, while living in a basement apartment in the NoLita neighborhood of Manhattan, Ben Regenspan, 37, became one of the unlucky New Yorkers to witness a rat crawl out of his bathroom."

Dodai Stewart also cited the case of a New Yorker who fell into a sinkhole full of rats: "I didn't want to scream because I was afraid of having rats in my mouth."

That article in The New York Times pointed out, however, that it is very rare to be bitten by a rat: there are only about 100 attacks a year in all of New York. Few but enough to freak people out.

Despite their tameness, the massive presence of rats in a city is a real danger to public health: they transmit diseases of all kinds. According to the American CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), rats can transmit HPS (hantavirus pulmonary syndrome), leptospirosis, lymphocytic choriomeningitis, plague and typhus.

New York City is well aware that it is facing a veritable rat population explosion. According to the New York Post, rodent sightings and reports to police were 60,000 in 2022 and 40,000 as of September 2023.

The authorities are fighting the rats but the pandemic was a milestone that still leaves traces: the confinement left the city streets in the power of rodents. As Michael Kolomatsky wrote in The New York Times, "during the pandemic the rats seemed to be winning."

But although there are many more now, the truth is that New York has always lived with rats. Is there an explanation why one of the main and most developed capitals in the world has such a crazy number of rodents? There are those who point out a specific cause.

"The rats are multiplying because our city is addicted to throwing garbage in bags on the street," said a Curbed report in August 2023.

The brown rat (also called Norway rat) is the predominant species in New York. For decades it competed with the black rat and finally declared itself the winner in dominating the city.

However, despite the fact that (as Wikipedia states in the 'Rats of New York' entry) the rat is a "cultural symbol" of the city, there is another American city with a larger rodent population.

The pest control company Orkin published a ranking (collected by NBC New York) that placed Chicago as the true rat capital of the United States.

Image: Neal Kharawala / Unsplash

Be that as it may, New York lives with its rats and even exhibits them to curious visitors on guided tours. Will they one day disappear from the streets of this iconic city?