Rats attack ritzy NYC block thats home to doctors, professors chewing up cars, trash bins and playgrounds: Valley of the Rats

A vermin invasion has turned a ritzy Upper West Side block into “The Valley of the Rats.”Residents are said they’re afraid to venture out at night along the elite stretch — where doctors and professors live and boxing legend Floyd Mayweather owns more than a dozen buildings — because of the horror-movie-sized rats of the massive rodents that chew their way into cars, gnaw through trash bins and scurry around the local playground.“I need to move out, because I can’t live in fear,” said Ankita Brahmaroutu, 31, a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University Irving Medical Center who has lived on the block for about a year.“I’ve been so scared to go outside sometimes, I’ll just take an Uber to the subway because I don’t want to walk down the street,” Brahmarouto said.“Our sense of community has been lost because of the rats … you used to see a lot more people (outside) with their dominoes tables.”One 40-year-old resident who grew up on the block between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue said locals aren’t able to “walk on the sidewalk.“They’re eating us up,” she said.

“Even when you’re home, you hear people screaming when they see a rat.“It’s embarrassing when you bring visitors over,” she added.“And you have to go through what I call ‘The Valley of the Rats.'”Under-siege residents have logged 311 complaints with little change so they’ve now created a neighborhood group called the West 109th Street Block Association to fight against the vermin invasion by filling tree beds taken over by the rats.“I don’t like to go out at night,” added Emily Horowitz, a 20-year block veteran, “because it’s not one or two rats once in a while: it’s a siege of rats.”Horowitz, 49, said two dead rats were recently left decomposing on the sidewalk – near the local intermediate school – for roughly a week before they were cleaned up earlier this month.

The rodent residents have become so emboldened that they’ve even ...