On a sunny, brisk morning in Harlem, where Morningside Avenue and Manhattan Avenue meet, a tactical team in New York City’s forever war gathered around a tree, ready to kill.
The crew members — municipal workers in reflective vests — looked down at the tree bed. A Chick-fil-A sandwich carton had been dragged halfway into one of several large holes. There were domes in the soil, an indication of tunnels underneath.
Rat burrows.
The workers pulled on gloves. One of them tapped a dirt mound a few times with the end of a rake handle, and the soil shifted.
The rat was fat, but fast. In a flash, it darted across the sidewalk and disappeared under a metal gate between two residential buildings.
Unfazed, the humans moved slowly. They cleared the trash, raked and leveled the soil of the tree bed, then closed up most of the holes with expanding foam, gravel and steel wool.
Into the last hole they snaked a hose, which was attached to the BurrowRx, a gas-powered rat killing machine on wheels. The team’s exterminator turned on the machine, which began pumping carbon monoxide into the burrow.
“It’s done humanely,” said Danny Hernandez, an administrative parks and recreation manager, describing how the rodents, at present, may be dying underground. “The rats get drowsy, and they fall asleep. Permanently.”
The BurrowRx poses less collateral risk than poison, Mr. Hernandez said, which puts children, pets and birds at risk. As he explained that the machine uses an oil to make the carbon monoxide visible as smoke, some wisps seeped out from cracks in the pavement.
“That shows you how far the burrow goes, under the sidewalk,” said Jose Baez, a park supervisor.
New York City has been waging war on rats for ages, and the humans certainly have the technological advantage. The BurrowRx is the latest of an array of methods city officials have tried, from traps to birth control to poison to dry ice to the toxic drowning bucket introduced by then-Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams.
As mayor, Mr. Adams installed a Rat Czar, Kathleen Corradi.
Ms. Corradi quietly left that position in October 2025. New York does not currently employ a Rat Czar.
The rats remain, and the city continues to take a multipronged approach to curbing the rodents.
Several city agencies are in on the mission. The Parks Department is working on eradicating rats from tree beds. The Department of Sanitation has led an effort to have people put garbage bags in a container instead of directly on the street (the jargon term is “containerization”). The Department of Health conducts complaint-based inspections for rat activity, generating block-level data that is visualized on a color-coded map in the department’s Rat Information Portal. (On the map, pink = rats. And there’s a lot of pink.)
So, are the humans of New York winning their war?
It’s hard to say. Progress is difficult to measure. It’s unclear how many rats even live in New York.
“It’s really hard to do a rat census,” said Caroline Bragdon, the Health Department’s director of neighborhood interventions for pest control services.
It’s easier to count the humans who have complained about rats — although those numbers do not paint a clear picture, either. So far this year, New Yorkers have filed 25,025 rodent complaints with 311. That’s the lowest number recorded for the same period in the seven years of data analyzed by The New York Times.
But the 311 data is not perfect. The app for rodent complaints wasn’t working for nine months between last year and this year. More people complain in some neighborhoods than in others. And the way information is routed through different city agencies has changed over time.
“I caution people from taking away too much from that 311 data, because it’s very, very messy,” Ms. Bragdon warned.
She points instead to the building inspection data. On that front, there is good news. Coming out of the pandemic, inspectors were noticing a lot of rats, Ms. Bragdon said, but that is now changing. “The number and percent of properties that fail inspection is beginning to decline,” she said, adding, “We think, long-term, we’re going to see success in continued declines in rat activity.”
Back at the tree bed in Harlem, the BurrowRx churned for about a minute before the street tree rodent mitigation team turned it off.
If there were any rats remaining in the tunnels under the tree, they died a quiet, unceremonious death.
Mr. Hernandez and his street tree rodent mitigation team members are doing what they can. The city currently has three teams of six employees actively responding to 311 concerns about rats in tree beds, and they have tackled about 4,000 service requests to evict rats from tree beds in the past year.
But the scope of the war is daunting. “We have a team of six,” Mr. Hernandez said. “And there are 600,000 or 700,000 tree beds.” He sighed. “It would take us 150 years to hit every tree bed in New York,” he added.
Once the machine was turned off, team members raked, spread dirt, pruned the tree. One worker neatly laid out a layer of Department of Sanitation-branded compost around the roots.
The final result was a dramatic improvement. The tree bed looked beautiful.
The team hustled over to the next two tree beds. From the steps of a nearby apartment building, two women watched the whirlwind of work.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” called out one of the women, Virginia Frazier.
Ms. Frazier, 64, had lived on the block for over 30 years. She described the rat problem as “horrendous.” She avoids the sidewalk at night, because the rats scamper between the garbage cans and the tree beds.
“They’re controlling this area,” she said.
Her neighbor, Shirley Brown, 66, had been the one who contacted 311 about the rat-infested tree beds. Ms. Brown had also taken video of the rats emerging from the burrows and sent it to the city.
“I’m so happy to see you,” she said to the Parks crew, walking by with a big smile.
Ms. Brown was thrilled about the refurbished tree beds, but pointed to a line of plastic trash receptacles alongside the building on the corner.
Each receptacle lid had been chewed open by rats.
The trash cans were on the private property of a residential building and not under the purview of the Parks Department.
“Now we have to reach out to the Department of Health,” Mr. Hernandez said.
The Parks Department will often come back to walk the block with the Department of Health and the Department of Sanitation.
Mr. Hernandez pointed out that humans are often at fault for enticing the rats they abhor. “We’re the ones putting our trash out for collection right in that same tree bed that’s infested, so you’ve got an all-day buffet for rodents,” he said.
After treating each tree bed, the Parks Department left a small paper sign letting residents know about their work — and reminding them to maintain the tree bed by keeping it free of litter, weeds and canine waste.
“It’s a collective issue,” Mr. Hernandez said. “It takes a village.”
He paused and then looked over his glasses.
“We’ve got more work than we can handle, to be honest with you,” he said.
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