Pest Control in Morrisania, Bronx
Morrisania spreads across the central South Bronx between Crotona Park on the east and Claremont Park to the west, roughly from East 161st Street up toward the Cross Bronx Expressway. Third Avenue and Boston Road are the main commercial streets, and Metro-North's Harlem Line stops at Melrose and Tremont stations on the neighborhood's western edge. The area is home to a large Black and Latino population, with many families living in public housing such as Morrisania Air Rights and Butler Houses as well as in newer factory-built two-family homes that replaced vacant lots. Morris High School, among the oldest public high schools in the borough, anchors a small historic district of rowhouses along Boston Road.
Also known as: Claremont Village, Crotona.
About Morrisania
Morrisania was the manor of the Morris family, whose members included Lewis Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Gouverneur Morris, who reportedly proposed the site as a national capital. The estate was subdivided into villages in the mid-1800s, and after annexation to New York City in 1874 it filled with apartment houses. In the mid-1900s its clubs on Boston Road and Prospect Avenue were a hub of jazz and Latin music.
Common Pest Problems in Morrisania
Morrisania is framed by two large parks, and the wooded slopes of Crotona and Claremont Parks give raccoons and squirrels a home base from which they raid garbage cans and sometimes move into attics and wall voids of the neighborhood's two-family houses. Rats burrow in the parks' edges and in the lawns of big public housing campuses, then travel at night toward the dumpsters and bagged trash behind Third Avenue's stores and fast-food restaurants.
Inside, the story is mostly German cockroaches and mice. Large NYCHA buildings and older walk-ups share trash chutes, pipe chases and compactor rooms that allow infestations to spread floor to floor, and tenants often find that cockroaches return soon after a single apartment is treated. Mice follow heating pipes up from basements once cold weather arrives. The newer detached and semi-detached homes have fewer shared walls, but their yards and decks can attract rats if garbage and pet food are left outside.