Rachel Chase, a longtime New Yorker, is used to seeing rats in Central Park. Rats rattling the bushes. Rats scurrying across sidewalks. Rats lurking just behind fences, their little black eyes alert.
But last Saturday, the rats of Central Park were like nothing she’d ever seen.
At midmorning she took her children, ages 2 and 4, to the Wild West Playground, near the park’s entrance at West 93rd Street. It’s an awesome spot, with forts, sandboxes and slides.
At around 11:30, Ms. Chase started readying to leave. She needed to be at the Ambassador Theater an hour before curtain for the 2:30 matinee of “Chicago the Musical.” (She stars in the show, playing Roxie Hart.)
Then, as she was about to grab her stroller, she saw movement. It was in the undercarriage, down where Ms. Chase keeps toys, baby wipes and sippy cups. She yelled, “Hey!”
Two rats — possibly three? — climbed out of the stroller and bolted away.
Aware that her children were watching, Ms. Chase did not freak out. Instead she calmly cleaned the stroller seat with antibacterial wipes, helped her children inside and then walked home, where she attacked the stroller with different combinations of dish soap and bleach.
“I wanted to set it on fire,” she said of the rat-defiled stroller. “It’s just gross. It’s so gross!”
She posted a description of her horror in UWS Mommas, a private Facebook group for mothers on the Upper West Side. Her post attracted a deluge of responses, many of which confirmed what seemed to be an invasion of rats.
Rather than running rampant across the entire neighborhood, however, the rats seemed to stick to a few specific locations, including three playgrounds on the western edge of Central Park and the median on Broadway near 96th Street.
Last week, The West Side Rag, a local newspaper, ran a photo of two dozen rats swarming in the median. The New York Post followed, publishing photos and a video of rats in the Tots Playground at West 68th Street, including a shot of a rat perched on the wheel of a baby stroller.
The rat panic of the Upper West Side comes as sightings citywide have declined. Rat complaints to 311 are down 17 percent in the first eight months of 2025 compared with the same period last year, according to data from the city. Across the city, 311 calls about rats started to spike in 2021, during the Covid pandemic, and have declined slightly in the years since.
But in the playgrounds of Central Park, parents and nannies see no evidence of rat populations declining. The causes of the apparent infestations are no mystery, said Jason Munshi-South, a biologist who spent years studying rats in New York City. The playgrounds offer three things that rats love: food scraps, dirt for digging burrows and low shrubs perfect for hiding.
“Rats in these locations surprise me not at all,” said Mr. Munshi-South, now a professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Shaun Abreu, the city councilman whose district includes West Harlem and parts of the Upper West Side, said he believes the infestation at 96th and Broadway is exacerbated by people who distribute food to the pigeons that congregate there.
“It’s insane,” Mr. Abreu said, “to think that a few individuals are feeding this explosive rat infestation.”
No pigeon feeders were present during a visit to the intersection on Wednesday morning. But somebody had dumped a mound of hard pretzels on the sidewalk near the entrance to the subway station, and dozens of pigeons took turns lunging at them. They gobbled for a few minutes, then sauntered off, apparently satiated, leaving a still substantial pile of pretzels.
When the pigeons leave, the rats descend, Jason Torres, who lives nearby, said. Every weekday morning he sits on a bench in the median to drink a small coffee and smoke a Marlboro Light before taking the subway to his job as a home health aide. On Wednesday, his bench was surrounded by garbage. Beneath him lay an open and mostly empty bottle of Orange Crush and a greasy box from Arturo’s Coal Oven Pizza. Beside him was a box from Magnolia Bakery.
“A rat walked across my foot the other day,” said Mr. Torres, 47. “They’re bold. You can stomp your foot all you want, but they’re New York City rats. They are not afraid.”
The children and their grown-ups visiting the playgrounds along Central Park West can confirm the audacity of the Manhattan rat. Jane Pickett, 8, was happily running laps in Adventure Playground near West 67th Street on Tuesday when she spotted a rat near her foot. She screamed and darted away.
“There are so many rats!” she said. “I don’t like it.”
Her mother, Kate Pickett, maintained that the rat problem that afternoon was actually mild. Try returning to the park around sunset, she said.
“We had family visiting this week, and it’s embarrassing,” said Ms. Pickett, 40, who hosted relatives from Arizona in the family’s apartment, half a block from the park. “It’s like, ‘Yay! Welcome to Central Park!’ And now we have all these rats popping out.”
Marlene Charlemagne, a nanny who often brings two children to Adventure Playground, screams at the rats. She stomps her feet. She chases them with sticks. The rats do not care. They scatter, only to return immediately, sneaking under benches to reach stray scraps of food.
So Ms. Charlemagne started bringing her own pink Ziploc bags, which she uses to seal up the snack garbage of her children: discarded muffin wrappers, orange peels and the like.
Not that it makes much difference, she said. In the scrubby area beyond the playground fence, rats could be seen racing among sandwich wrappers and discarded plastic straws.
“It’s like they have their own playground,” Ms. Charlemagne said. “They run right under the bench as I’m sitting here. They have no fear.”
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate for mayor, lives with his wife and six elderly cats in a one-bedroom apartment on West 73rd Street between West End Avenue and Broadway. His proximity to several of the reported rat hubs, and his well-documented love for cats, informs his solution to the rat problem should he win the November election: more cats.
Specifically, Mr. Sliwa hopes the city will partner with volunteers who maintain colonies of feral cats, whose population swelled during the pandemic to as many as half a million. When a rat problem is reported anywhere in the city, he said, the keepers could move their cats in.
“I’m an expert in this area because I stay up at night,” when more rats come out of their holes, Mr. Sliwa said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “You’re never going to win a war against rats. You only can have détente.”
Luke Caramanico and Camille Baker contributed reporting.
Christopher Maag is a reporter covering the New York City region for The Times.
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