nyc vignette: the greasy fuzzballs
I love NYC because it is just the right amount of unpleasant.
It is a city that will keep you on your toes by throwing curveballs at you—thus, forcing you to pay attention to how fractally interesting it is.
It is also a city that will floor you with the prettiest skyscrapers while simultaneously giving you the largest, ugliest rats you can think of — and lots of them.
There is an urban legend that says that there are more rats than people in NYC. This is untrue, even anecdotally. I was once at the Union St station with my parents, waiting for the next train. And there was just a single greasy fuzzball scuttling about.
“We usually have much bigger ones around here,” said the old woman beside us, sensing my parents' unfamiliarity with the rat situation.
We outnumbered the rats five-to-one that day which is actually more than the national average of 8.5 million people to 3 million rats—this pegs the ratio to about three people for every rat.
Almost everything has been tried to make that ratio nicer since the 1940s. But you cannot curb the rats.
That, of course, does not stop people from trying. When I was in NYC, a solution to curb the curb rats was presented by McKinsey. After taking $4 million, they came to the conclusion that if garbage bags were covered and kept inside lidded bins, the rats won't have anything to gnaw at, and thus won't emerge in hordes on the sidewalk every night.
Near my brother's apartment in Manhattan, it was common to find four to five rats ‘scurrying’ about the building entrance. I have accidentally kicked one while getting in once.
But with the garbage bins in place, the rats disappeared overnight. The fact that such a simple solution of all things did the trick was ...almost disappointing.
Consider that there were countless anti-rat ‘task forces’, proposals to poison them, sterilize their reproductive systems and even suffocate them by pouring dry ice in their burrows.
But none of that worked. They still occupied public spaces, with the gusto of a proud taxpayer. Scott Stringer, ex-borough president of Manhattan famously quipped, “The rats don’t scurry. They walk right up to you and say ‘How are you, Mr Borough President?’ ”
I was returning home at night with my brother in my final week of my NYC stay.
“Where have those McKinsey bins gone? The garbage bags are all over the curb again.”
Three greasy fuzzballs frolicked about at the building entrance.
“Ooh, that’s not a small one at all.”
this vignette was authored in a real notebook with pen and paper