Walking across Broadway and Bleeker on Thursday I saw a squashed rat in the intersection. And then another, and another, and so forth. Seven in total. Look both ways. They must have been disturbed by something, or some source of food was drawing them across. They didn’t all get squashed at the same time. The last one, for example is much fresher than the first few shots. Someone made a comment that if there were seven squashed, there must have been many more that made it across.

Flickr images taken with iPhone 4 (not posted here because they’re gruesome).

Walking home late last night in downtown Brooklyn, I happened upon a colony of rats on the corner of Lawrence and Willoughby. There were about ten rats, males, females, very young to adult. For example, these five rats:

The group was originating from the fenced off area that had construction materials, and crossing over to garbage bags on another part of the sidewalk. The construction area had i-beams, long tubes and pipes, perfect byways for rats. A few of the rats looked to be about 12-13 inches, about 2lbs. I couldn’t tell what they were eating, but at one point one of the rats dashed back to the site with what looked like a giant bread crust. I spoke to a guy who wanted to know what I was doing, he worked for the MTA. He said that this corner has long had a problem with rats, and told me of other sites that would be worth checking out. For example, Battery Park, near the WTC sculpture. The rats were ultimately unnerved by my presence, taking photos with the flash, and sitting not so far away from their route to the garbage bags. This one was another chance pic, where I wasn’t sure if there was a rat in the frame because it was too dark, but the flash reveals much much more!

I started a flickr set dedicated to rat sightings. It can be a representation of a rat like this one below, or a real rat like the one below that.

On September 27th I took the D train up to Yankee Stadium with Michael Edgecumbe to see the Tree Museum on the Grand Concourse, in the Bronx. I had a few small expectations about how it would be displayed, how the information would be constructed so the average person could interact easily. I heard the trees were hard to find because the plaques were mounted on the ground, small circles on the pavement at the base of the tree. I hadn’t really heard anything about how the information would be communicated, or what it was about exactly. I purposefully decided not to read about it before so I could have a passerby’s first impression.

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