“Oh, oh—guys, over here!”
Kathleen Corradi, New York City’s first “rat czar,” pulled a flashlight from her back pocket and aimed it at the base of a trash can. She clicked off the light, almost smirking: “Yep, we’ve got droppings.”
Nearly two dozen New Yorkers—plus one concerned homeowner from Jersey City, New Jersey—raced toward the find. “Droppings!” a woman squealed, dragging her friend closer. On a summer evening in Brooklyn’s Herbert Von King Park, no one could quite explain why they had gathered to hunt vermin. The closest thing to an answer came from a 35-year-old librarian at New York University who took the subway from Hell’s Kitchen just to be here.
“I’m starstruck,” she gushed about Corradi. “She’s my hero. There’s nothing more New York than learning about rats.”
Corradi—five feet, two inches, a lesbian, and handpicked by Mayor Eric Adams out of hundreds of applicants in 2023 as citywide director of rodent mitigation, to use her official title—has become a kind of folk hero for rat enthusiasts. She calls garbage her “first love,” has hosted more than 40 public “rat walks” like this one in the heart of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, and talks about rats the way that most people talk about dogs, even though she aims to eradicate them. Her mandate, straight from Adams himself, is to “send rats packing.”
