The Rats in the Toilets

One May afternoon a few years ago, on the second floor of my prewar co-op building in Carroll Gardens, my neighbor was working in her bedroom when she heard splashing from the bathroom. Assuming her young son had left the water running, she rounded the corner to find the first sign that our building was in trouble. “Holy fuck,” she screamed before jumping back out into the hallway and slamming the door behind her. In her toilet bowl, she’d discovered a rat — a big one. (“Girthy,” she said when describing it.) She called her husband, who, also surprised, asked her repeatedly, “Are you sure it was a rat?” Perhaps, he suggested, it was a snake instead, as if that were much better. (He’d heard some neighborhood folklore about those incidents.) “There is no doubt in my mind,” she insisted, to which her husband replied, “You know what you have to do now, right?”

“No,” she said.

“You have to go back into the bathroom and put down the lid.”

By the time she’d finally worked up the nerve, the rat had disappeared, leaving only its cylindrical, thumb-size droppings behind. She wasn’t exactly relieved. She remembered that the rodent hadn’t just been swimming — it had also been scraping at the sides of the bowl, scrambling to get out, but, lacking a foothold, it had slid back down. Had it gone back out through the drainpipe, or was it in her apartment now?

At this point, my relationship with the city was something like that of a good mother with her toddler: Bring on your worst behavior and I will continue to love you no matter what. Yet, like many New York City couples, my husband and I were in the midst of a long-standing, low-boil, to-move-or-not-to-move argument. While the city still thrilled me — even our basement apartment felt like a win (so much space for so much less money!) — my husband was ready to flee with our toddler daughter to more manageable environs. That night, I assured myself: A little rat in a toilet wasn’t going to crack my resolve.

Six days later, the news got worse. The same second-floor neighbor — whose own toilet rat had never reappeared — was in the basement with a drain-cleaning company to check the pipes leading to the main city sewer line. They lifted a heavy steel plate in the floor that covered a three-by-three-foot, 18-inch-deep well. Inside, they found that the cap to the building’s waste pipe was missing and three or four rats were popping in and out of it, terrified by the disruption. They immediately installed a new cap, then replaced the metal plate, but two rats were left behind in the basement.

“These rats can no longer get into the waste/sewer line,” my neighbor wrote in a message to our all-residents email list. “They are stuck in our building.”

I had trouble sleeping that night in my subterranean bedroom, right next to that basement space, but in the morning I convinced myself that the rats were trapped under that metal plate and would soon die, after which someone braver than I am would remove their corpses and this weeklong episode would end.

Two months later, our new neighbors next door, also on the basement level, spotted a tail in their bedroom. The next morning, the wife woke up to find that the top of her newborn’s bottle had been gnawed off as she slept on the couch nearby with her baby.

“Oh god!!” I emailed my husband. “Not yummy,” he emailed back.

“Rats hate the smell of peppermint,” the traumatized mother emailed us all. The exterminators had assured her that if you put cotton balls soaked with peppermint oil “next to a sardine, the rat will still avoid the sardine.” We ran off to the organic market in search of the stuff. Everyone’s apartment smelled like candy canes.

The day after that, the new mom caught the rat herself in a cardboard box in her kitchen. But the problem had not been solved. It had just started.

We began to see droppings in our toilets each morning like the hallmark “calling card” clues of a serial killer. We began to dread every bathroom trip. I ceased to have a restful evacuation. Instead, I perfected a position in which only one cheek touched the seat as the rest of my body twisted around so I could maintain a view of the water below. After all, what kind of lifetime trauma would be created — not to mention disgustingness — if, while doing the deed, one of the critters popped up from below and took a bite out of my bare ass?

Needless to say, we were all motivated to solve this problem — and so commenced a jam-packed month of increasingly harebrained schemes and a near-daily parade of exterminators, plumbers, and drain-cleaners. I took the lead. We started with the obvious: installing door sweeps. Soon after, our toilets transformed into Dwell coffee tables with museum catalogues piled on top to weigh down the lids — the heavier the better. Disused law-school tomes got a new life. We dumped so much bleach into our privies each night that our building smelled less like a candy cane and more like the best version of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. We met to brainstorm Rube Goldberg–like schemes: a contraption to dangle poison from the toilet lids? I argued for a British invention my father had discovered on the website snake-rat-frog-in-toilet.com.

Still: Each night, the scratching, the splashing. Each morning, the telltale feces.

None of the many professionals I called had heard of quite such an extreme building invasion, and I was perversely proud to be shocking people who had spent decades on the job. One plumber thought the problem was that sediment had built up in our pipes, allowing rats the grip they needed to travel through them. He said he was basing his theory on the “biology of the pest.” He sent a powerful water jet through our drainage system, like some kind of sewage-line colonic. Two days later, the husband of the shattered mother next door sent an email with no body, only a subject line: “huge rat droppings in our toilet this morning.” The plumber, not noticeably rebuked, shrugged and said we’d have to get the city to clean out the street’s sewer lines instead. “Call 311,” he said. Good luck with that, I thought, though every one of us tried.

I couldn’t just let this go. I was now three months pregnant and, unable to face the john’s Jaws soundtrack, had been peeing in the bathtub at night. I felt certain this trial was about my ability to survive in the city of my dreams — and to avoid the more tranquil yet existentially dreadful alternative towns my husband was starting to push.

A few days later, I found the email address of the head rodentologist for New York City. Thirty-six minutes later, my new best friend replied. Dr. Robert Corrigan was a soft-spoken (some might say “mousy”) scientist with a Brooklyn accent, a sly sense of humor, and a warm smile. His job, tragically, was to rid the city of the animals he adored. In graduate school, he’d slept among them on weekends in an infested rural Indiana barn. His girlfriend had refused to join him, but “it was the most exciting eight months of my life.” He assured me that the mosquitoes in my daughter’s nursery were more dangerous than his beloved rodents. He theorized that a single rogue rat had first found its way into our building from the city’s sewer system — more or less sightseeing, he told me, the equivalent of “going out for a Sunday drive” — and had established a scent trail that others had followed. When I spoke to Corrigan last week, he said this kind of thing is “not rare” but “it’s not frequent, either.” Indeed, he said, he has seen “famous actors have this happen to them in famous residential buildings.” Corrigan was soon on our case, contacting the Department of Environmental Protection on our behalf. He thought perhaps there was an infestation in the main sewer line. He wanted DEP to block off our street, remove the manhole covers, and bait and clear that line.

By then, the rats had made it to the fourth-floor toilets. No apartment was safe.

On September 16, a month after I’d contacted Corrigan and four months after this whole nightmare had begun, DEP shut down our street. Via our basement, they put a camera in our waste line. They found no evidence of rats. Indeed, the main sewer looked, in Corrigan’s words, “gorgeous.” That put the hunt for the source back to square one.

“Short of disassembling the building,” he wrote, “it would be difficult to solve this mystery. As a curious scientist, that does frustrate me, but oh well … so many rats, so little time.”

If we couldn’t find the source, maybe we could block the rats’ access to their all-night raves — tighten the red velvet rope, so to speak. At the beginning of October, we installed a check valve, a flap that lets waste out while preventing it from coming in, onto the same pipe that had been missing a cap nearly five months earlier. Corrigan and other experts he knows don’t recommend this solution, but we craved action — and it helped, somewhat. A month later, my neighbors were still seeing the scat, though less often. In one more attempt to end this six-month ordeal, we discussed trying a building-coordinated flush (“On the count of three!”) to flood the lines and sweep any occupants out to sea. In retrospect, the idea was silly and desperate. But what choice did we have? My due date was coming up, and I had a toddler I needed to potty train but whose tush I couldn’t bring myself to let hang over that piranha pool. I put it off, bought more diapers. My husband began to send me Zillow listings for Providence.

“I think a Building Flush is worth a shot,” I wrote to my neighbors. “I will also say that I am not opposed to taking apart our building …”

And then, one day, they were just gone. No reason, no explanation, no more poop nuggets, no more synchronized sewer swimming. No one dared email to say it was over. We didn’t want to curse it. The fear, though, took a lot longer to flush away.

That February, my second daughter arrived. That spring, we began the process of putting our apartment up for sale. I spent several years dramatically wrestling with no longer being a New Yorker — and turned the incident into a great “I survived New York” cocktail-party story, one that made my new Rhode Island friends recoil. We never found out why the whole incident started or ended, and I never again passed a toilet without putting down the lid. In 2022, while renovating our guest bathroom in our new home in RI, our contractor left a hole exposed for the new toilet and I coached myself not to worry. Paranoia will destroy ya, I chanted.

Two days later, my parents, visiting, heard scratching in the night and came face-to-face with a rat that had crawled up through the pipe. The next morning, with the confidence of an experienced pro, I picked up the phone to call yet another exterminator. I may have left New York, I realized, but New York had not left me.