When the newly renovated northern end of City Hall Park officially reopened in October, organizers planned a celebration complete with performances on the freshly cut lawn. But, said Skip Blumberg, a major force behind the park renovation, they thought better of it. The performances were to take place after dark, and the rats that frequent the park along with lunching city workers, might have stolen the spotlight.
Nine months after the rats of Taco Bell had their time in the limelight, attention more recently turned to rats in city parks, particularly in City Hall Park. But while such incidents capture headlines, they represent nothing unusual. Rats, said pest expert Dale Kaukeinen, are a constant presence in New York, whether or not they make the evening news -- or star on You Tube.
"No one should have to live with rats," the New York City health department says on its Web site. That may be true -- but we all do.
"If the presence of a grizzly bear is the indicator of the wilderness of an area, the range of unsettled habitat, then a rat is an indicator of the presence of man," wrote Robert Sullivan in Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants.
Rats bite, are linked to disease and can cause damage by gnawing through walls, wiring and just abut everything else. Many of us find them downright terrifying. So, as long as rats have live in the city, New Yorkers have fought to control them.
Estimates of the problem vary. Although many say that New York City has one rat per person -- for a total of about 8 million -- others figure there could be as many as almost 100 million rats in New York City. More optimistically, several experts, including Sullivan, put the population as far smaller.
But rats do frequent many, if not most, parts of the city. While the rats of City Hall Park have attracted attention recently, rats are found in many city parks. “I don’t know of a park where you won’t see them,” Geoffrey Croft, president of NYC Park Advocates, a nonprofit group, told the New York Times.
The city received more than 30,000 rodent complaints last year, according to the Mayor's Management Report. And rats have been known to plague city schools, housing projects and cavort along even fashionable streets.
There was, however, a golden age for rat control. At a so-called rat summit held in 2000, several speakers noted that federal and city programs kept the rat population in check from World War II until the 1980s. In 1949, according to Sullivan, a rat expert from Baltimore trapped rats in New York to try to determine how many lived here. He estimated there were 256,000.
"New York was the model for the country," wrote Jenny Laurie. "Restaurant owners and landlords were required to dispose of garbage properly and to keep sidewalks and basements in good repair (no cracks) -- or they were fined. The rat population was well under control."
That changed in the 1980s when, under President Ronald Reagan, the government cut funding for urban programs, including pest control. With the city facing a budget crunch, the rats roared back.
Overall, New York may be almost as attractive to rats as to foreign tourists seeking bargains. A report released in October found New York to be the major U.S. city most vulnerable to rats. Kaukeinen, who co-authored the report with another pest expert, Bruce Colvin, said New York City's age, moisture and poverty rate combine to make it particularly enticing.
The black garbage bags, which some have described as a nightly banquet for rats, only exacerbate the problem. Some locations, such as parks with ground cover, prove particularly enticing. Blumberg noted that the catacombs in lower Manhattan provide hiding for rats, making City Hill Park vulnerable to the rodents. Our own bad habits make matters worse. Food left behind and carelessly dumped garbage cans serve as rat magnets.
Faced with the burgeoning rat population, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani formed a rat task force in 2000. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has stepped up the effort. As part of it, the city has tried to shift the emphasis from poisoning to depriving rats of their food. This has included advising people not to feed pigeons and squirrels because rats enjoy the leftovers and trying to enforce sanitation rules.
"You can bring a trainload or boatload of rodenticide into the city," Edgar Butts, who works on environmental health for the city, told the New York Times. "But as long as you have food and harborage, you'll have rats."
Kaukeinen said, under the circumstances, New York is doing fairly well. "New York is on the ball, " he said praising the administration for having hired consultant Robert Corrigan to train city workers to combat rats.
But, Kaukeinen said, fighting rats is a huge task that competes with other issues for money and other resources. Those involved in New York City, he said, "know what needs to be done, and they'd probably like more money to do it."
Cities can strengthen their program by aggressively enforcing garbage codes. Some, Kaukeinen said, have replaced the black plastic garbage bags piled at the curbside with rollout bins where people must place their garbage. No such proposal, though, appears to be in the works for New York City.
Changing behavior would also help. "We want rats to go away but we keep trash under our desks. We want the city to kill the rats, but we throw McDonald's bags out the car window," Corrigan has said. "This is a big complex problem for which there is no easy solution."
Some people, though, believe we should accept the rats in our midst. Writing in Gotham Gazette in 2000, Elaine Sloan, a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said New Yorkers might want to clean up their city to reduce the number of rats, but she also advised city residents to change their attitudes about the rodents. Rats, she wrote, " are intelligent, curious and sensitive animals" who are "meticulous about cleaning themselves and take very special care of their young." Â
About 1 million pigeons make their homes in New York City mating for life, nesting on windowsills, swooping down for scraps of food and leaving droppings on the shoulders of hapless pedestrians.
Pigeons – think St. Marks Square in Venice or London’s pigeon feeding ladyin "Mary Poppins" -- have long been a mainstay of urban life. But now several City Council members have proposed measures to limit the birds, sparking support, ridicule and heated debate.
Feelings about animals always run high (see the recent furorover the trial of a Texas bird lover who killed a cat), and the New York City pigeon has been a polarizing influence since it started taking over our cement landscape centuries ago. You either love 'em, or you hate 'em. You either find feeding them a therapeutic experience or duck for cover when one swoops by your head making a beeline for the remnants of a falafel.
But the actual threat these winged city dwellers pose remains open for debate. Some animal advocates claim they carry no risk, while several city officials say the pigeon threatens the health, public safety and quality of life of all New Yorkers.
City Councilmember Simcha Felder of Brooklyn has no doubt pigeons pose a hazard. He has released a report contending that pigeon droppings can host a number of communicable diseases, such as ornithosis, encephalitis, Newcastle disease, cryptococcosis, toxoplasmosis, salmonella food poisoning and histoplasmosis. To confront this threat, he wants to create a "Pigeon Czar" to oversee the fight to contain the birds.
Felder also wants to ban the feeding pigeons, a proposal that sparked discussions from Chicago to China. The ban could carry a $1,000 fine for violators (the council member has since said the $1,000 is not set in stone, but that any penalty must be hefty enough to make a difference).
"We came up with what I think is a very humane solution to the issue of the pigeon population," said Felder. "For those people that love to feed pigeons, they should do so on their own properties."
Felder has offered several other proposals to control the pigeon population from contraceptives to locked trashcans with smaller openings. Keeping food off the streets and making trash inaccessible to the pigeons, Felder said, would have the greatest effect.
"A husband says to a wife, 'You want to go out tonight?'" Felder said of pigeon couples. "And instead of going to Radio City Music Hall, they go to a trashcan around the corner."
Felder's feeding legislation will probably be formally introduced in December. He said he is "confident" it will pass by the summer.
But some city officials have expressed reservations. When Council Speaker Christine Quinn was asked whether she would support Felder's pigeon proposal she replied: "I am not a fan of pigeons. I have no love of pigeons at all. I find them to be flying rats, and I have no use for them. I don’t want to comment on the legislation, and I will not let my personal pigeon position impact my professional pigeon position, which I will be taking later upon review of the pigeon possibilities in the legislation, and that’s my full use of alliteration for the day."
That irritated at least one New York City animal rights group, which likened comparing pigeons to flying rats to using a racial epitaph.
A number of other city legislators also have concerns about pigeons.
At the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, pigeons reportedly snatch away breakfasts and defecate on commuters, who already have to deal with daily trips that can include bus, boat and rail. This caught the attention of City Council Minority Leader James Oddo.
"The insult on top of that injury is to be standing there in the heat and the cold having a pigeon crap on you," said Oddo. "I don’t care about pigeons. I care about the people underneath the pigeons. The people that literally have to duck and weave and bob for the simple right to go to work."
Last month, he urged the Department of Transportation to consider feeding contraceptives to the birds. Oddo said the state Department of Environmental Conservation is considering the idea, and he expects approval early next year.
In Queens, the birds have honed in on the Amtrak overpass in Astoria - another site where passersby get slimy surprises from hidden nests above. City Councilmember Peter Vallone of Astoria, chair of the Public Safety Committee, recently asked Amtrak to consider hanging a net to protect pedestrians. He said the pigeon droppings, which can contain corrosive chemicals like ammonia, may cause structural damage to the overpass.
The anti-avian proposals have some bird lovers and other members of the pro-pigeon population up in arms, or rather wings.
"I'd like to ask these council people or these people that run our government in the city, I would like to know is your goal to get rid of pigeons?" asked Anna Dove (she reportedly changed her name from Kuglemas), the founder of the New York Bird Club, which boasts 60 members. The group is planning a rally to protest the pigeon legislation on the steps of City Hall on Nov. 30.
Pigeons, said Dove, are not the dirty, disease-carrying animals many people believe them to be.
For now, the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygieneagrees with Dove, at least in part. The department said pigeons pose no risk to the general public.
Though those who work among a "large quantity" of pigeon droppings could be exposed to "some risk," city dwellers merely cleaning their homes or windowsills should not fret, according to the health department.
Several national animal rights groups, including the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, support Felder’s measures. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animalshas also expressed support for pigeon control programs as long as the birds’ food supply is not cut off entirely.
"PETA does support reducing the pigeon population for the bird's own sake," said Michael McGraw, a spokesperson for PETA. "I don’t think anyone disagrees there are many more pigeons… It's worth remembering that it's not the pigeons’ fault they are here and that they're hungry."
According to the city health department, pigeon feeding currently is not prohibited, but it is discouraged. The department said the seed, bread or other leftovers can draw in less-sanitary urban wildlife, like rats (see related story).
According to a spokesperson from the Department of Sanitation, throwing food on any street or in any park falls within the city's littering laws. Enforcement, though, has been a challenge for the department.
The health department will not take a position on Felder's proposal until the actual bill is introduced.
With the recent spate of pigeon proposals, some New Yorkers might question whether city officials' time can be better spent.
"I know cynics and critics like to scoff and mock, and people out there are saying, 'Aren’t there more important things to worry about than pigeons?'" said Oddo, who successfully championed a measure restricting aluminum baseball bats. "I don’t care about pigeons. I care about people that are commuting on the Staten Island Ferry who have to literally avoid being defecated on on a daily basis."
The pigeon predicament has turned into a divisive issue. On the City Room blog, one reader stated: "A $1,000 fine is the minimum any pigeon feeder should have to pay for fouling our sidewalks and parks with these disease-ridden flying rodents."
But Dan Stackhouse disagreed. “The iridescent purple/green sheen on a pigeon’s neck is beautiful and mystified me as a kid. Carrier pigeons have won more Medals of Honor for animals than any other animal… Pigeons always try to get out of our way and never harm us except by the dreaded disrespect from above, which is not really their fault,” he wrote. “If these pigeon-hating politicians can’t come up with better things to say about rats, then I suggest they work on the rat problem first."
So maybe pigeons are misunderstood – or just unfairly pigeonholed.Â
About half of high school kids in New York City have had sex. Roughly one in five female students admits she did not use protection the last time. Over 50 percent of students have never heard of emergency contraception. Given those numbers, it is hardly surprising that, according to the state, there were 23,000 pregnancies among young women aged 15 to 19 in 2004, with six in ten of them ending in abortion.
The statistics may sound like an alarm bell for policymakers and educators. Yet amid swelling evidence that sex is fact of life for many kids – and that many are making risky choices – New York State does not require schools to teach students about their sexuality.
Until recently, the state’s effort to fill that educational vacuum has been limited largely to telling teens not to have sex. The state and federal governments have poured millions of dollars into programs that promote abstaining until marriage. These programs exclusively push just saying no over any kind of safe sex or contraception.
But New York is rethinking sex education. Earlier this year, the state Department of Health rejected federal funding for abstinence programs, stoking a political debate over what to tell kids about sex and how. Progressive advocacy groups are urging lawmakers to focus not just on persuading kids to wait, but helping them make wiser choices, through full, broad-based sex education.
New York City absorbed over $5 million dollars in abstinence-only program funding in fiscal year 2005, according to an analysis by the New York Civil Liberties Union. Nonetheless, community groups point to a persistent shortage of educational resources for teen sexual health. Currently, aside from abstinence-only education, youth throughout New York State sometimes receive sex-related information through community pregnancy-prevention programs or in school-based classes. But without a legal mandate, the state leaves it to individual districts and schools to determine how, or whether, to discuss sexuality with students.
Britta Ruona, a teen advocate with Planned Parenthood of New York City, says that when it comes to sex, her peers are not getting the guidance they need. In her outreach work in local communities, she said, it is not uncommon to find teens who think jumping up and down after sex can prevent pregnancy or that sexually transmitted diseases cannot be spread through oral sex.
“ A lot of teens, if they don't have a sex education class in their school, they'll get their information from another source,” Ruona said, “like the streets, and the media, and movies.”
The Bush administration has promoted chastity as the best way to fill the sexual knowledge gap and reduce unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Federal funding for abstinence-only education ballooned from about $80 million in fiscal year 2001 to more than $175 million in 2007. In addition to so-called Title V grants for states , the Adolescent Family Life Act and Community-Based Abstinence Education programs funnel money directly to local organizations, many of them religiously based. .
While New York State accepted this money during the Pataki years, Albany recently declined its Title V funding, which had provided about $3.7 million in federal grants. Health Commissioner Richard Daines said he now plans to redirect state funds toward more-comprehensive sex-ed programs.
New York follows several other states, including Wisconsin and New Jersey in shedding its federal chastity belt. The move reflects rising concerns as civil-liberties and family-planning advocates criticize the ethics of abstinence-only programs, and new research questions their effectiveness.
“ Abstinence-only-until-marriage programs censor critical information about birth control and condoms, and they are not effective,” said Galen Sherwin, director of the NYCLU’s Reproductive Rights Project. “To focus exclusively on abstinence, to the exclusion of other critical information about prevention, is really just irresponsible.”
“ Would you jump out of a plane if your parachute worked just sometimes? The truth is condoms fail.”
That’s the lesson on safe sex promoted by ProjecTruth, a federally funded abstinence initiative run by Catholic Charities in western New York. The program, which reaches thousands of young people each year in schools and community centers, teaches that a youth without premarital sex “is a richly rewarding lifestyle.” To warn students of the potential consequences of sex, the curriculum lists emotions it says many young people frequently feel after a first sexual experience: “used, dirty, lonely, confused, scared, ashamed, sad.”
“ We talk about children as holistic,” said ProjecTruth Director Judy Vogtli. “We're more than a sexual being; we're mind, body, spirit. So, there's no condom that protects the heart.”
Title V guidelines require grantees like ProjecTruth to stress “the social, psychological and health gains to be realized by abstaining” and the “harmful psychological and physical effects” of premarital sex, along with the idea that “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity.” Under the latest rules for groups receiving grants grants under the community-based abstinence education program, curriculums cannot promote or distribute contraceptives, or instruct students about their use.
Critics say abstinence-only programs often use scare tactics and misinformation to deter teens from having sex–and still do not work.
The NYCLU recently examined 39 of New York’s abstinence-only programs, which collectively received about $11.5 million in state and federal funding in fiscal year 2005. The analysis found that over 60 percent of the funds went to curricula using biased or inaccurate information. Problems cited ranged from flawed or suppressed information about contraception to insensitive views on sexual orientation.
And according to a federal study released in April, youth who participated in abstinence-only programs reported about the same rate of sexual activity and the same rate of unprotected sex as peers who did not participate in the programs.
Civil-rights groups argue that the Bush administration’s abstinence focus marginalizes relationships that fall outside the traditional heterosexual, two-parent household and so excludes gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered youth.
Inadequate sex education for gay youth may deepen troubling patterns outside the classroom. New HIV diagnoses among men aged 13 to 29 who have sex with men in New York City have risen by about a third since 2001.
“ Not only do gay and lesbian youth often have to go without the sexual health information that all teens need,” said Ross Levi, director of public policy and education with the advocacy organization Empire State Pride Agenda. “They are further oppressed in being invisible, and in worst cases, demonized by the abstinence-only curriculum.”Informed Decisions
Critics of abstinence-only say sex education should empower youth to negotiate sex and its risks on their own.
Progressive sex education may find a home in New York City. The Sex Ed Alliance of New York City, which includes the New York AIDS Coalition, Planned Parenthood NYC, and other community groups, wants to see mandatory sex education in all public schools, in every grade, supported by school partnerships with healthcare organizations. The coalition is pressing city officials to develop a comprehensive curriculum to cover all safe-sex and prevention practices, along with relationship skills, while including the perspectives of different cultures, sexual orientations and gender identities.
But ultimately, the future of sex education in the city’s public schools depends on whether Albany and Washington view it as a budgetary and legislative priority.
In Congress, the fate of Title V is in limbo, as lawmakers remain gridlocked over the reauthorization of the act. As an interim fix, the national advocacy group Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States is lobbying for amendments that would enable states to use Title V funds for comprehensive programs.
Advocates of comprehensive sex education in New York, meanwhile, are pushing the Healthy Teens Act. The bill, which passed the Assembly but stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate, would establish a grant system for “age-appropriate and medically-accurate” programs encompassing a full range of safe-sex issues.
Jason McGuire, a lobbyist with the conservative Christian group New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms, said the problem with comprehensive sex education is that “it assumes the teens will become sexually active.”
“ You don't take that approach in any other area in life,” he argued. “We don't talk about safer ways to snort cocaine.”
But Traci Perry, Planned Parenthood NYC’s vice president of public affairs, said, “Comprehensive sex ed is much more than simply pregnancy prevention. It’s about sexuality, it’s about relationships. It’s making good decisions. It’s being healthy in a number of ways.”
Jelani Addams Rosa, a 17-year-old peer educator with the NYCLU’s Teen Health Initiative, said sex education should reflect social realities. “The problem is not that teens are having sex,” she said. “The problem is the lack of knowledge of how to deal with yourself, and your significant other, once you’ve started to have sex.”
Michelle Chen is a freelance reporter in Manhattan and a native New Yorker. Â