I was sure these guys were gonna get hurt yanking this huge, untrimmed dead tree down TOWARD them — thankfully, they were more skillful than I expected.

Through the last year, every time I dug up a part of the back yard, I cursed the former owners. “Why is there so much garbage tossed back here!?” Luis tried to reason: “Maybe they didn’t pick up the trash for a certain period?” We have asked many people from “back in the day” and nobody seems to have a good answer.

Now that it’s spring, I’m cleaning the yard with renewed intensity so that we have something more to enjoy by summer. Always keen to find old labels and stuff, I snatched this up out of a pile of glass and old carpet, and dusted it off. It was a medicine label from a local pharmacy, from 1983. I didn’t recognize the name as that of anyone in the family we got the house from (they had been here since 1970). Then I realized the address is from the building two doors down. I had been blaming the massive mess on the owners of the house — why would they do this to their own property???, we constantly ask the wind. I was amazed they could even generate this much trash. It now seems that for 30 years, the lovely neighbors have been flinging their household trash into yards all around here. This jibes with contemporary stories of (and my own experience with) neighbors tossing trash over fences.

There is still plenty of trash that cannot be blamed on the neighbors — tens of shower curtains (they seem to have had a fetish), acres of shag carpet, an entire truck’s drive shaft — but it’s clear to me now that they may have just given up under the wave of trash and decay forced upon them by the times.

I still don’t have the whole answer, but the more evidence I find and people I talk to, the more I realize just how bad it was in Bushwick in the 80s.

Rat hole and gnawed wood.

Except for a couple weeks last year when they terrorized us, mice have not been that big a deal. Keep crumbs off the floor, make sure to clean the dishes every day, and keep the trash shut tight. No problem, just the occasional mouse here and there. I figured, as long as we’re relatively clean, we’ll never have to worry about rats.

Well, I was wrong. You have to be immaculate. And even then, they still like your warm house in the winter.

Above the front basement windows there was a small gap that I figured rats and mice could get in. I later found evidence — debris from inside had been kicked outside. A couple weeks ago I decided to cram chunks of concrete in the gaps — they fit snugly. No rat was getting in here, I said to myself with self-satisfaction. At that moment as I was crouching there, I felt something hit me in the ass. Then a rat darted between my legs and frantically bounced up and down in front of the former hole. Realizing the hole was gone, it darted in another direction. My neighbor’s dog tried to catch it but it just escaped his claws and ran toward the back yard.

Yesterday as I came home from Fortunata’s, I saw a pile of splinters and a big chunk of wood at the same spot. A fucking rat had gnawed away the wood AROUND the concrete and reopened a new hole. I’m going to have to screw in wire mesh and mash concrete over it.

Then this morning one of my tenants said he caught a rat going through his trash at 6am. Last week it shit on his bed. Not cool.

A friend in Florida recommended “place packs.” I’ve been nervous about using poison because of neighborhood dogs, but he said the rats just take them away and eat them where they hide. They croak and then it just stinks for a week. Awful.

The new presence of rats on my block could be due to all the debris-filled lots being cleared off for new construction in the last few months. Other than that, not knowing much about rodent habitats, I have no other guesses.

Anyone have any helpful info… or rat horror stories?

Anyone whose responsibility it is to maintain their sidewalk in Bushwick knows how difficult it can be. The trash accumulation here is epic. I am always picking up bits of trash and do a full sweeping once a week. My tree pit is a magnet for condiment packages, tissues, and of course, dog shit. In October, I got a $100 litter ticket on a Saturday afternoon, just hours after I had actually done one of my full sweeps. Despite an experienced neighbor’s insistence that it was futile to fight the ticket, I followed the appeal instructions to the letter.

Today, three and a half months later, I got a letter from the Environmental Control Board, in which the judge wrote:

“I find Respondent’s testimony credible. In light of the facts and circumstances described above, I find Respondent has established that reasonable efforts were made to keep the area free from debris. Therefore the Notice of Violation is dismissed.”

As long as you are slightly less lazy than the bureaucracy, you can win. Fight all your tickets, property owners! It costs $3 to send something certified… if you have time to get to the post office and wait for that bureaucracy’s rusty gears to grind.

I was sweeping up today in front of the house and found this very amusing.

I was watching it snow out the front windows today when I saw a sight that shocked me: a woman’s dog crapped in my tree pit, and the woman cleaned it up. She even struggled a little with the bag she brought, but that didn’t deter her — she was picking up that turd, and no feisty bag was gonna stop her. I watched in awe as she bent down and did what responsible adult people do. I wanted to open the window and thank her, but that would have probably been a bit creepy.

They’ve been cleaning the remains of this house out for about 6 months now. Not sure what the deal is with the delays. In that time they have totally renovated the burned-out house next door.

When we moved in here, there were no mice or bugs of any kind, which was strange because it’s a very old house and the previous inhabitants were… not so clean. We saw plenty of evidence of previous infestations — closets full of mouse turds, dead German cockroaches all over the place, gnawed wood — but no live specimens. This lasted for months until a nearby lot was being cleared of the debris of a house that had burned down. Apparently the mice that lived in that mess took off for greener pastures — our yard and house. They terrorized us for two weeks, crapping on the kitchen counters and in the silverware drawers, darting between our legs, and then abruptly disappeared. There was an occasional mouse here and there for the next few months, and now they’re starting to nest downstairs, to the chagrin of one of my housemates.

We tried humane traps. The mice laugh. We tried snap traps. The mice roll their eyes. I finally allowed the above housemate to bring home glue traps, which he laid out like a force field across the path where the mice enter. They just don’t cross the line. We hypothesized that the mice know the smell of the glue. Whatever the reason, nobody in this entire house has ever caught a mouse in any kind of trap. And our dog, bred to hunt mice in German castles, is useless. I have been hearing similar stories from other people in the hood, and it seems that Bushwick mice have street smarts: they know what will kill them and they avoid it.

For now, I’m stuffing holes with steel wool and being maniacal about keeping the trash sealed up. I’m even scattering cotton balls with peppermint oil on them along their living room-kitchen run path. I haven’t seen any in a couple of weeks, so it could be working. When we dip into freezing temperatures, I think the battle will only become more difficult.

Anyone else have rodent horror or success stories to share?

I swept in front of the house Saturday morning, and then went to the Fortunata’s Bumrush. When I got home 4 hours later, there was a fresh accumulation of litter behind my fence and a notice of violation from the Environmental Control Board. Luis snatched it off the gate — “Are you fucking kidding me?” — and handed it to me. I am constantly fighting the waves of random trash that plague my street. Most days, sweeping once a day is enough, but sometimes the trash is relentless.

There’s something really perverse about ticketing property owners without bothering to use common sense. Overflowing trash cans with no lids are an obvious problem, and I can understand a citation in that case. A few scraps of trash on the ground right near my trash cans with their lids snapped on tight, arranged in such a way that it is obvious to anyone who uses their rational faculties for a split second that it was blown in from outside, is not grounds for a violation. Not a single scrap of trash in front of my house was generated in my house. Fining me for not being fast enough with the broom is punishing the victim. It’s like prosecuting a rape victim for public lewdness.

A guy who has owned a house around the corner for 15 years told me they once fined him for a single piece of paper in the gutter. When he went to court to appeal, they told him that if he loses, he has to pay $300 instead of $100. Not being a gambling man, he paid the $100 fine. I wasn’t planning on appealing, but then I remembered that we have a copy of a dismissal of a similar fine won by the previous owners of our place last year. They swept twice a day and still got a violation, which was overturned by a reasonable judge. I figured I’d send a copy of that in with my own letter explaining the situation: that it is impossible to keep the front of the house litter-free at all times, especially on such a high-traffic street.

It’s clear that sanitation cops are not interested in what’s fair or what’s logical — salaries have to get paid and positions have to be justified, after all, and slapping fines with a pain-in-the-ass appeal process on homeowners is a great way to get that money flowing in.

Last night after work I cleaned the kitchen and took the trash out. When I got outside, I decided to sweep the front of the house: trash area, sidewalk, gutter, tree pit — I even swept part of the sidewalk in front of the neighbors’. I think I was kind of hepped up on all the caffeine I had had throughout the day and needed to burn it off. I picked up every last cigarette butt, quarter water container, and Doritos bag and put it in the bag I was putting on the curb. Shit was sparkling. As I swept up the last heap of trash in the gutter, squatting between two cars, I realized that there was a dollar among the refuse. Kinda nasty, but far be it from me to leave money on the ground.

I guess my class privilege (aka, desire not to live in filth) handed me that extra buck. Hm?