On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 1:36 PM, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>wrote:
> I'm gonna hint that I want this book for xmas:
>
> "if you are in New York... you are within close proximity to one or more
> rats having sex"
>
> http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/stratigraphies-of-infestation.html
>
> [...]
>
> Sullivan quotes one rat-control professional, for instance, who "foresees a
> day when he will be hired to analyze a building's weaknesses, vis-à-vis
> pests and rodents... 'They design buildings to support pigeons and for
> infiltration by rodents because they don't think about it. Grand Central
> Station, right? They just renovated it, right? Who knows what they spend on
> that, right? You know how much they spend on pest control? You know how much
> they budgeted? Nothing. I did all the extra work there, but they had to pay
> us out of the emergency budget.'"
>
> Pest control here becomes an explicitly architectural problem, something
> you can design both for and against. Imagine an entire degree program in
> infestation-resistant urban design.
>
> Sullivan points out that a massive, urban-scale architectural intervention,
> in the form of a quarantine wall fortifying all of New York City against
> rats, was once tentatively planned: “There was a time in New York, in the
> 1920s," he writes, "when scientists proposed a great wall along the
> waterfront to shut out rats completely, to seal out rats and, thus, forever
> end rat fear. Eventually, though, the idea was deemed implausible and
> abandoned: rats will always get through.”
>
> But it's the particular subset of urban knowledge that has been actively
> cultivated within the pest control industry that fascinates me here.
> Sullivan spends a bit of time with a man named Larry Adams, a municipal
> rodent control expert. “If you hang around Larry long enough," Sullivan
> says, "you realize that he sees the city in a way that most people don’tin
> layers." And what follows is well worth quoting in full:
> He sees the parks and the streets and then he sees the subways and the
> sewers and even the old tunnels underneath the sewers. He sees the city that
> is on the maps and the city that was on the mapsthe city’s past, the city
> of hidden speakeasies and ancient tunnels, the inklings of old streams and
> hills. "People don’t realize the subterranean conditions out there," he
> likes to say. "People don’t realize the levels. People don’t realize the we
> got things down there from the Revolution. A lot of people don’t realize
> that there’s just layers of settlers here, that things just get bricked off,
> covered up and all. They’re not accessible to people, but they are to rats.
> And they have rats down there that have maybe never seen the surface. If
> they did, then they’d run people out. Like in the movies. You see, we only
> see the tail end of it. And we only see the weak rats, the ones that get
> forced out to look for food.”
> [...]
>
>
>
>
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