The unimaginable can still happen in New York, a city that defies logic.
Just look at the case of Kenny Bollwerk, 36 years old and originally from San Louis (Missouri), who moved to the big city to work as a teacher at St. John’s University.
The pandemic led him to telework classes, search the internet and discover TikTok, where he started uploading videos about the desolate metropolis where the homeless and rodents running madly for 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 tours that follow the rat route.
Despite the fact that they live in all parts of the world, these sewer animals, increasingly brave to colonize foreign territory, are especially associated with New York. Mayor Eric Adams describes them as “public enemy number one”.
In April, he appointed the biologist Kathleen Corradi municipal director of mitigation, the captain or czar of this fight against rats. According to official data, they have received around 39,000 calls reporting sightings, although this is a 15% drop.
“There is interest from a tourism perspective,” says Luke Miller, owner of Real New York Tours. Although the company does not yet have a specific route, they have started to prepare it after receiving numerous requests from interested people. “We will create the offer by popular demand”, he emphasizes. “It’s as if they had put a piece of cheese in front of my mouth”, he jokes.
It is a nocturnal route, through dark places – “we start in a pub, to lubricate a little” –, which starts in his neighborhood, in Chinatown, a territory rich in nutrients for rodents; it continues along Fulton Street, with a stop at Ryder’s Alley, the alley where Robert Sullivan spent a year writing the book Rats (2009), and ends at the port area of ??South Street Seaport in lower Manhattan.
The idea is to make it mysterious, “areas that tourists don’t normally visit”, he insists.
“People are fascinated with rats in a macabre sense,” answers Professor Michael Parsons, urban ecologist at Fordham University, who has studied rodents in the city for two decades. “It is very important that citizens are educated and that they become aware of rats to improve public hygiene. I think this will bring benefits in this sense”, he said about the walks. “Several mayors have declared war on rats. There have been few obvious benefits from this war”, he clarifies.
Beings hated and vilified, of the underworld and, in turn, that cause attraction.
Back to the origin. Bollwerk, who quit his college job and devoted himself to being a tiktoker (with a supplemental salary at a pizzeria in Queens), makes one thing clear during the conversation: “I don’t like rats.”
So, their initial plan consisted of uploading recordings to warn of the problem and try to contribute to combating it. He focused on his neighborhood. The answer unsettled him. His videos, and there are already close to a hundred on the subject, are over 100,000 views in New York, in the United States and abroad, with moments of 10,000 users connected live.
In a mixture of entertainment and denunciation, New York followers began sending him proposals to make recordings, revealing places to go with the camera.
And not only that, more and more people are asking him to accompany him during his adventures around the city. “Rats are like New York’s mascot and they want to see them in person,” he explains.
“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 can take you any night to places where there could be a hundred”, he confesses.
Among the “customers”, there are entire families. “It’s crazy the way it brings people together,” he points out. “It’s about visiting different places, many get bored of seeing the Empire State or Times Square and rats are the new topic,” he says.
Its current route starts at Grand Central Terminal, runs along Calle 42 to Tercera Avinguda. Other times, it goes into lower Manhattan.
None of this sounds strange to Robert Corrigan, a consultant specializing in these animals, who was a professor and researcher on rodents at Purdue University for 16 years. He explains that in 2005, in collaboration with the Center for Disease and Prevention (CDC) and the government of New York, they did 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 the rodents with a bad image, carriers of infections and which, in the United States alone, cause annual damage to infrastructure estimated at 20,000 million. But, in turn, they excel at intelligence, make decisions, are altruistic, and experience regret, remorse, and social justice. And, like humans, they are capable of devouring each other in situations of extreme hunger, as happened during the pandemic.
“Rats are not aggressive if they have food,” says Corrigan. He experienced it as, as a graduate and while doing his doctorate, he slept on the floor of a barn full of rats. Just in case, he was injected with vaccines. “Honestly, the first two nights I was nervous, but, if I look 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 take advantage of humans. It is a successful animal all over the globe because it knows how to adapt to what it finds”, 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”.
