4 days ago
After Watching Carrie's ‘And Just Like That' Rodent Infestation, I Asked: How Do You Get Rid of Rats in NYC?
A few short minutes into the second episode of And Just Like That's third season, we viewers see Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw typing away in her lovely Gramercy Park garden. The light is warm. A cute squirrel chews in a tree. The flowers bloom. The heels are high. And then—rats.
In video footage of tsunamis, what might be even more eerie than the devastation wrought by the wave are the moments of calm that come before, when the tide gets sucked away from the sand. This is how I felt watching Carrie, writing an ill-advised historical fiction novel in that Instagram story typewriter font, as rats swarmed her garden, a mere whisker away from her satin Maison Margiela Tabi Monster bow pumps (which originally retailed for a casual $1,920). The rats all scurry out of an ominous rustling bush, making their own little Fast and the Furriest sequel.
A plagued (get it) Carrie sets about hiring an exterminating company, 'Rat-A-Tat' (cute), employees of which proceed to tear up her entire garden. She then must hire a hot landscape architect played by Logan Marshall-Green, who is a serious actor but also the guy from The O.C. who gets shot to the sounds of Imogen Heap's 'Hide and Seek,' aka the 'mmmm whatcha say' song. I love television!
For all that Sex and the City is meant to include New York City as the fifth lead or whatever, the show featured very few New York City rats, perhaps due to its uptown environs. Mice only show up in two episodes—the one where Charlotte dates a 'gay-straight' man (politically incorrect, also tea, Happy Pride Month) who freaks out when a mouse squeaks in his perfect kitchen, and the one where Mikhail Baryshnikov's Alexandr Petrovsky must murder a mouse in Carrie's normal apartment, back in the days before she became a real estate baron.
But rats are a reality that all New Yorkers must face. A 2023 study revealed that there are about three million rats living in the city. Mayor Eric 'my haters become my waiters' Adams subsequently appointed the city's first 'rat czar,' tasked with reducing the rodent population with initiatives like rat birth control and putting garbage in cans instead of, say, the street. AJLT—always on the pulse! And so I couldn't help but wonder: is it possible to keep your NYC yard rat-free?
