Of Rats and Rikers
This week, I talked about how New York went from Occupy Wall Street to (a push to) evacuate Rikers Island in 10 years flat on CBS Eye on the World With John Batchelor, and helped break the news at The Daily Beast about Donald Trump suing his niece Mary and the New York Times.
On FAQ NYC, the brilliant Robert Sullivan, the author of Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants, talked with us about the news that Central Park's Barry the Owl ate rat poison that may have impaired her ability to fly before her fatal collision with a Conservancy truck, and much more:
There's a kind of glorious history of politicians winning through rats. If you want to look back at mayors and rats, it's fascinating to see how the different mayoral styles match up to the rat programs. Giuliani was just like, "we're gonna get them." And Bloomberg was like, "let's count the rats," but you can't count the rats. So "we'll count the rat bites." No, data isn't going to do this. Rats get headlines. I vaguely remember Eric Adams' particular method of exterminating rats and all I can say is, here's the best way: You don't feed them and then they don't you don't have rats. So garbage is really the issue here, fixing sanitation, which is a huge issue.
And, staying with rats and returning to Rikers, I wrote a column for the Daily News about Where New York Dumps Its Trash
Where New York dumps its trash: Rikers Island has vexed politicians for generations – New York Daily News
Some reading for Mayor de Blasio as he’s finally been shamed into making a trip to Rikers Island this coming week, his first in more than four years, to see for himself the poor, nasty and br…
Some reading for Mayor de Blasio as he’s finally been shamed into making a trip to Rikers Island this coming week, his first in more than four years, to see for himself the poor, nasty and brutish conditions there after an inmate tried to kill himself in front of state lawmakers who he tried to stop from visiting and 13 Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation called on the Biden administration to do more since “the city cannot be trusted,” and a federal monitor questioned whether the Correction Department’s “leadership possess the level of competency to safely manage” the jail and testified about guards missing or ignoring suicide attempts directly in front of them.
“Prisoners will have the privilege…of serving their time in the finest and most up-to-date penitentiary in the United States” the Daily News reported in 1928, under the headline “Rikers Island Prison To Be Model for U.S.” once it replaced the out-of-date and run-down jail on Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island).
A “Crime Clinic to Reclaim Prisoners, Not Punish, Is Planned In New York” read a headline in 1929. “The first of its kind in any country, the hope is that the city that leads the nation in population may also lead in crime reduction and humane and scientific treatment of the criminal (by) separating the sick sheep from the criminal goats.”
But by 1930, the news was that “Pigs, Dogs and Rats Battle for Control of Rikers Island.”
The island was being used as both the city’s main garbage dump and as an under-construction but already in-use jail, divided “like all Gaul” into one end for dumping trash and another for locking up criminals and between them “a jolly little garden spot and piggery” where prisoners under guard could “raise their vegetables and bring up their pigs in peace and content.”
But since “twenty-five years of dumping have encouraged a sizable swarm of rats,” the Sanitation Department brought in a hundred or so dogs that “perform their duty efficiently during the day as rat-killers and protecting men, but in the long summer evenings they hear the call of the wild and go forth in packs to prey on innocent pigs.”
When the correction commissioner complained about how the “wild, ferocious, homeless, friendless, vicious dogs” were a “menace to the pigs,” his counterpart at Sanitation replied that “it would be impossible for men to work on the island if not for the dogs…the most gentle friendly animals in the world who went about their business of killing a couple of hundred rats a day.” Without them, he suggested, “the rats would overrun the island and perhaps swim to the mainland and destroy the city.”
(A few years earlier, the island’s rats had reportedly cornered, killed and devoured Battleaxe Bill, an Irish terrier “with a proper fighting spirit and a hatred for the Island’s invaders.”)
If not for the trash that fed the rats that made the city bring in the dogs that slaughtered the pigs, most of Rikers wouldn’t be there. And after the Supreme Court in 1931 stopped New York City from dumping garbage into the Atlantic that inevitably washed up on New Jersey’s shores, the inflow accelerated.
Rikers Island, a mere 67 acres in 1654, had swollen to about 400 by 1934, with a fiery trash tower “looming above the prisons like a lava flow from some Mount Aetna.”
“At night it is like a forest of Christmas trees,” swooned the sanitation commissioner. “First one little light then another, until the whole hillside is let up with little fires” in what the Brooklyn Eagle described as “an immense mountain range of trash…infested with a rat population estimated conservatively at a quarter of a million (and) whose top is heaped each day (with) enough ashes, paper, discarded furniture and sweepings to cover ten city blocks twelve feet deep.”
There were still dogs there, and one of them had bitten one of the soot-covered “Tarzans” wielding scoop shovels and pitchforks to tend to the endless inflow of new waste. “When a dog or a rat that has been living on this stuff bites you, you get a rabies test real quick.”
Long after any hope of “humane and scientific treatment of the criminal” was forgotten, the island continued to do double duty housing the city’s trash and refuse, along with its prisoners, until Robert Moses prepared for the 1939 World’s Fair at the brand new Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, land that itself had served as a dumping ground until then, since he didn’t want Rikers and its methane stench as his backdrop.
If it’s too late for an old dog like de Blasio to learn new tricks, maybe there’s food for thought somewhere in here for our presumptive next mayor, Eric Adams, who’s vowed, quite literally, to build a better rat trap and who will soon inherit Rikers’ problems along with the city’s pencilled-in plan to close the out-of-date and run-down jail by 2027.
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