Pest Control in Bedford Park, Bronx
Bedford Park lies in the north-central Bronx between Jerome Park Reservoir and the New York Botanical Garden, with Mosholu Parkway along its northern edge and Fordham to the south. Bedford Park Boulevard is the main east-west street, connecting Lehman College and the Bronx High School of Science area to the Grand Concourse and Webster Avenue. The B and D trains stop at Bedford Park Boulevard and Kingsbridge Road on the Concourse, the 4 stops at Bedford Park Boulevard–Lehman College, and Metro-North serves Botanical Garden station. The housing is mostly large prewar apartment buildings, and the population is diverse, with Dominican, Mexican, Bangladeshi, Puerto Rican and West African families.
Also known as: Bedford Park Boulevard, Botanical Garden area.
About Bedford Park
Bedford Park began in the 1880s as a planned suburb modeled on the Bedford Park garden suburb in London, with curving streets and Queen Anne style homes. Only a few of those original houses survive. The New York Botanical Garden was established in 1891, and when the Concourse subway arrived in the 1930s developers built blocks of Art Deco and Tudor style apartment buildings for middle-class families, many of them Irish and Jewish.
Common Pest Problems in Bedford Park
Bedford Park sits between two of the largest green spaces in the borough, the Botanical Garden's old-growth forest and the grounds around Jerome Park Reservoir, and that gives squirrels and raccoons plenty of habitat right at the edge of a dense apartment district. Squirrels often get into the roofs of the older frame houses on streets like Bainbridge and Decatur Avenues, and raccoons scavenge trash along Webster Avenue and the Mosholu Parkway corridor at night.
The large prewar apartment buildings here are prone to mice in fall and winter, when rodents move in from parkland and along steam pipes and basement doors. German cockroaches are a year-round issue, particularly in buildings with ground-floor restaurants along Bedford Park Boulevard. Long-term tenants with closets full of stored woolens and carpets also report clothes moth damage, since these apartments are often large and have deep, rarely disturbed storage areas where moth larvae go unnoticed.