NEW YORK —As I crouched on the ground outside a construction site at midnight in Midtown Manhattan, filming overweight rats darting in and out of piles of trash as passersby looked on with mild curiosity—or outright disdain–I wondered how the hell it had come to this. How had I signed up to spend a weeknight seeking out New York’s (arguably) grossest residents?
It’s a thought that crosses the mind of our fearless leader for the evening, Kenny Bollwerk, pretty often. Bollwerk, 36, spends seven nights a week giving rat tours as part of his “Rat Tok” social media brand.
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“I can’t stand rats. They’re not pets. They’re not domesticated. These are wild rats out here that are causing issues,” Bollwerk said, dressed in his signature “Rat Daddy” baseball cap and T-shirt along with a neon security vest and headlamp. The gear may seem like overkill, but Bollwerk said he’s often out until 2 a.m. embedding with the vermin.
Although the city claims to be making strides towards curbing rat infestations, Bollwerk feels he’s had to fill in the gaps by shining a light on infestations, particularly in lower income communities. He likened his Rat Daddy alter ego to a “Batman” of sorts.
“Rat Daddy is out on the streets at night and doing this and bringing awareness to the issue.”
Bollwerk aka @nyc_kb moved to New York from St. Louis in 2019 and began doing tourist-friendly TikTok reviews for normal activities, like dining out. In January, he decided to add a rat tour to his offerings, both because it was “entertaining” and, he said, to help out small businesses that were struggling to deal with unwanted rats. His profile has since blown up, with more than 242,000 followers and a string of media appearances. One of his rat livestreams garnered 10,000 viewers.
He’s now in Season 4 of his Rat Tok tour series; each one has focused on a different infestation, with Bollwerk claiming that by drawing attention to them, he’s gotten the city to take action.
Our tour started out with what Bollwerk described as an “appetizer”—mice wreaking havoc at a snack shop in Grand Central station. We saw at least seven or eight of them running around as if they were performing in a Disney movie and flinging themselves off shelves of snacks that would undoubtedly be sold to tourists for a ridiculous mark-up the next day. Next we made a pit stop at Perkins Square across the street where we saw a handful of rats milling around a fenced-off construction site, but it was a pretty average sighting by New York standards. Then it was time for the grand finale, a sidewalk sandwiched between piles of trash and another construction site, where Bollwerk believes there are at least 100 rats nesting. For an hour, we watched as their monstrous forms scurried from behind a green construction wall and into the trash—and then back again.
Bollwerk has dubbed the area “Bubonic Boulevard”, which he scribbled in chalk on the sidewalk during our tour.
“I’m not going to areas where there’s one, two or three rats. I’m going to areas where at least 50 to 100 that you’re seeing out here tonight. And we’re going to these areas to try to bring change to the areas. You see the trash pile right behind me. That shouldn’t be a thing. It’s 2023, you’re living in New York City, one of the most expensive places to live. And we still have trash on the sidewalk like we’re living in 1920,” Bollwerk said.
New York’s rat problem is notorious. A report released by pest control company MMPC estimated there are 3 million rats in the city—a 50 percent jump from 2010.
In April, the city hired “rat czar” Kathleen Corradi who is being paid $155,000 to corral various city agencies and launch a “war on rats.” The mitigation efforts are starting in Harlem, which recently had its first Anti-Rat Day of Action, which included informing residents that putting trash in containers will thwart rats trying to get into the garbage—a fact that is widely known and implemented by many other major cities. (If anyone from the city is reading this, I too am willing to introduce the novel concept of proper garbage disposal to New York for $155,000 a year.)
While Bollwerk, who works at a pizza shop by day, doesn’t see himself as being in direct competition with Corradi, he said he’s a watchdog of the city’s efforts.
“We’re making sure that the city is really following up on all those policies that they’re putting in place and that we’re holding them accountable.”
Still, there’s no doubt Bollwerk’s brand is benefiting from the spotlight. He doesn’t charge for the rat tours, but he does get tips in addition to making money and sponsorships off his TikTok. He said he’s even had women slide into his DMs, asking for “Rat Daddy to come to my house and get rid of the rats.”
On this particular tour, there was only one attendee besides us—Lisa Jones—who’s been following Bollwerk’s antics on TikTok for a while now. She even had her own “Rat Daddy” shirt.
Jones told me she thinks Bollwerk’s mission is “great.”
“A lot of places they went, they are being taken care of,” she said. But she also seemed to get a kick out of the whole situation, at one point going live on TikTok, and shouting “get ‘em!” at the rats when people walked past them.
My own motivation for coming on the rat tour was exposure therapy. Before moving to New York a year ago, I was blissfully unaware that I had a rat phobia because I never had to encounter them with any frequency. That’s changed dramatically living in Brooklyn. I now bike around my neighborhood at night just to be on higher ground than them and I never wear open-toed shoes after sun down (I wore thigh-high boots on Bollwerk’s tour just in case any wanted to run up my leg). I don’t think it’s an unreasonable phobia—rats literally ate a baby here in 1860.
Most New Yorkers, on the other hand, seem unbothered by rats. When you ask about it, they’ll nonchalantly recount a story of the time a giant one ran across their foot or they passed by a wave of them undulating in a pile of trash like a beating heart. But, perhaps out of necessity, the city’s residents largely seem to have accepted and even embraced the rats, with some folks inexplicably describing them as cute.
It’s a level of indifference I aspire to, but I’m not sure Bollwerk’s tour did the trick. Just this past weekend, I was on my way to a party when I saw one pop out in front of me. I immediately doubled back and called an Uber instead of walking as I’d originally planned.
Oddly enough, it appears Bollwerk isn’t the only guide offering a rat component to their tours. Then again, finding a way to capitalize off rat infestations does seem like a very New York thing to do.
