Pest Control in Harlem, Manhattan
Harlem spans upper Manhattan from Central Park North at 110th Street to around 155th Street, between Fifth Avenue and St. Nicholas Avenue and Morningside Park. Known worldwide as a center of African American culture, it is home to the Apollo Theater, historic churches and soul food restaurants. Grand brownstones fill blocks such as Strivers' Row and Mount Morris Park, while 125th Street is a busy commercial corridor with chain stores, local businesses and street vendors. The neighborhood is served by the 2 and 3 on Lenox Avenue, the A, B, C and D on St. Nicholas Avenue and Metro-North at 125th Street.
Also known as: Central Harlem, Strivers' Row, Mount Morris Park.
About Harlem
Originally the Dutch village of Nieuw Haarlem, the area remained farmland until the 1880s, when elevated trains encouraged speculative building of brownstones and apartment buildings. An overbuilt market allowed Black New Yorkers to move in after 1904, and Harlem became the capital of Black America during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Decades of disinvestment followed, then renewed investment and brownstone restoration from the 1990s onward.
Common Pest Problems in Harlem
Harlem's brownstones, tenements and apartment buildings date largely from the late 1800s and early 1900s, and aging foundations, shared walls and old plumbing give mice and German cockroaches easy routes between homes. Large public housing campuses with open grounds and compactor areas support rat colonies, and rats move from there into brownstone areaways and backyards. Vacant lots and construction sites, less common today but still present, also harbor rats. Backyards help too.
Busy corridors like 125th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard have restaurants and food vendors whose trash attracts rats and pigeons. Pigeons roost on the ornate cornices of brownstones and under the elevated Metro-North viaduct along Park Avenue. Inside older homes, damp basements and bathrooms often harbor silverfish. Many brownstones have rear yards and garden apartments, and rats commonly burrow along fence lines and beneath decks, while mice slip indoors through gaps around old gas lines and basement windows when the weather cools.