Something unimaginable can still happen in New York, a city that defies logic.
Just look at the case of Kenny Bollwerk, 36, originally from St. Louis, Missouri, who moved to the Big Apple to teach at St. John's University.
The pandemic led him to teach remotely, to search the internet and discover TikTok, where he began to post videos about that desolate metropolis in which the homeless and murids running mad due to the lack of food were rarely seen on the streets.
One thing led to another, as they say, and today Bollwerk is the pioneer of sightseeing on the rat trail.
Although they live in all parts of the world, these sewer animals, increasingly braver to colonize foreign territory, are especially associated with New York. Mayor Eric Adams calls them “public enemy number one.”
Last April he appointed biologist Kathleen Corradi as municipal director of mitigation, the captain or tsar in this fight against rats. According to official data, there are about 39,000 calls reporting sightings, although this represents a decrease of 15%.
“There is interest from a tourism perspective,” says Luke Miller, owner of Real New York Tours. Although his company does not yet have a specific route, they have begun to prepare it after receiving numerous requests from interested people. “We are going to create that offer by popular demand,” he emphasizes. “It's like they put a piece of cheese in front of my mouth,” he jokes.
It is a night route, through dark places – “starting in a pub to lubricate a little” –, which starts in his neighborhood, in Chinatown, a territory rich in nutrients for rodents, continues along Fulton Street, stopping at Ryder's Alley, an alley in which Robert Sullivan spent a year to write his book Rats (2009), and concludes in the South Street Seaport area of lower Manhattan.
The idea is that it is something mysterious, “areas that tourists don't normally visit,” he insists.
“People are fascinated by rats in a macabre sense,” responds Professor Michael Parsons, an urban ecologist at Fordham University who has studied rodents in the city for two decades. “It is very important that citizens are educated and aware of rats in order to improve public hygiene. I think this will benefit in that sense,” he said about the tours. “Several mayors have declared war on rats. There have been few obvious benefits from that war,” he clarifies.
Hated and vilified beings, from hell and, in turn, causes of attraction.
Back to the origin. Bollwerk, who quit his job at university and dedicated himself to being a TikToker (with a salary supplement in a pizzeria in Queens), makes one thing clear in the conversation: “I don't like rats.”
So his initial plan was to post recordings to warn of the problem and try to help combat it. He zeroed in on his neighborhood. The answer disconcerted him. His videos, and there are already close to a hundred on the subject, have more than 100,000 views in New York, the United States and abroad, with moments from 10,000 users connected live.
In a mix of entertainment and denunciation, his New York followers began to send him proposals to make recordings, revealing places to go with his camera.
And not only that, more and more people are asking him to accompany them on their adventures around the city. “The rats are like the mascot of New York and they want to see this in person,” he clarifies.
“I don't know what the fascination is, maybe because people can't believe there are so many. You can run into one on the subway, I took you any night to places where there may be a hundred ”, she confesses.
Their “clients” include entire families. “It's crazy how much this brings people together,” she says. “It's about visiting different places, many get bored of seeing the Empire State or Times Square and rats are the new thing,” she says.
Its current route starts from Gran Central Terminal, runs along 42nd Street to Third Avenue. At other times he ventures into lower Manhattan.
None of this sounds strange to Robert Corrigan, a rodentology consultant who spent 16 years as a rodent professor and researcher at Purdue University. He recounts that in 2005, in collaboration with the Center for Diseases and Prevention (CDC) and the New York government, they conducted an experiment they called "rat safari" for their analyses. “It's a lot of fun and I'm not surprised that these guided tours are gaining followers,” he explains.
Corrigan knows what he's talking about. He knows well these murids with a bad image, carriers of infections and that, in the United States alone, cause annual damage to infrastructure estimated at 20,000 million. But at the same time, they stand out for their intelligence, they make decisions, they are altruistic and they experience repentance, remorse and social justice. And, like humans, they are capable of devouring each other in situations of extreme hunger, as happened in the pandemic.
"Rats are not aggressive if they have food," says Corrigan. He experienced it since as a graduate and doing his doctorate, he slept on the floor of a barn infested with rats. Just in case he injected himself with vaccines. "Honestly, the first two nights I was nervous, but looking back, it's probably the best experience of my life," he confesses.
He learned the lesson that exterminators are not the solution, but that cleanliness is the key. “Rats prey on humans. It is a successful animal throughout the globe because it knows how to adapt,” he adds.
For Bollwerk this opened up a new perspective. “New York is unpredictable,” he adds, “you go looking for rats and you never know what you'll find.”
