Pest Control in Financial District, Manhattan
The Financial District fills the southern tip of Manhattan below Chambers Street, bounded by the East River, Battery Park City and City Hall. Once almost entirely offices, FiDi has become one of the fastest-growing residential areas in the city, as dozens of early twentieth-century bank and insurance towers were converted into rental and condo apartments. Narrow colonial street patterns survive around Stone Street, Pearl Street and Maiden Lane, while the South Street Seaport draws crowds to its cobblestones and piers. Transit is exceptional: Fulton Center, Wall Street, Bowling Green and the Staten Island Ferry terminal connect residents to nearly every subway line in Lower Manhattan, and the district's weekday population still swells with office workers and tourists.
Also known as: FiDi, Wall Street.
About Financial District
This is where New Amsterdam began in the 1620s, with the Dutch wall that gave Wall Street its name marking the settlement's northern edge. After the Revolution the area became the nation's financial heart, and by the early 1900s masonry skyscrapers lined Broadway and William Street. When many firms moved to Midtown or left after 2001, city incentives encouraged converting vacant office towers to housing, reshaping the district into a mixed neighborhood where residents now live inside former trading floors.
Common Pest Problems in Financial District
Converted office towers were never designed as homes, so trash chutes, shared compactor rooms and miles of original utility shafts can give mice and German cockroaches easy highways between apartments. The dense cluster of lunch spots, food trucks and delis around Fulton Street and Stone Street produces a steady flow of restaurant waste, and older sewer and utility infrastructure beneath the narrow colonial lanes supports Norway rats that surface near trash bags set out at night. Ongoing construction and street work regularly disturbs burrows, pushing rats into new blocks.
Pigeons are a constant presence on the ornate cornices, ledges and plazas of the old bank buildings, and bird-control work such as netting and spikes is common on setbacks and terraces. Near the waterfront at the Seaport and along South Street, rats follow food vendors and tourist traffic. Inside, silverfish turn up in the damp lower floors and storage rooms of converted buildings, especially where old plaster and paper records were once stored.