Pest Control in Longwood, Bronx
Longwood lies just north of Hunts Point, roughly between Prospect Avenue, the Bruckner Expressway and Westchester Avenue, with Southern Boulevard as its busiest shopping street. It is one of the few South Bronx neighborhoods that kept much of its original housing: the Longwood Historic District preserves blocks of bowfront brick and limestone rowhouses from around 1900. The 2 and 5 trains run above Westchester Avenue with stops at Prospect Avenue, Jackson Avenue, Intervale Avenue and Simpson Street, and the 6 serves Longwood Avenue. Residents are largely Puerto Rican and Dominican, and community groups have turned vacant lots into gardens, including the well-known plantings on Kelly Street.
Also known as: Longwood Historic District, Foxhurst.
About Longwood
The area was once the Longwood estate, and developer George B. Johnson began building speculative rowhouses here around 1897, many designed by architect Warren C. Dickerson. Extension of the subway along Westchester Avenue in the early 1900s brought a wave of apartment buildings for working families. Longwood suffered heavily from arson and abandonment in the 1970s, but its core of rowhouses survived and was designated a city historic district in 1980.
Common Pest Problems in Longwood
Longwood's attached rowhouses are more than a century old, and settling, crumbling mortar and old coal chutes give mice easy access from front areaways and backyards. Because the houses share party walls, a mouse or roach problem next door often becomes yours. Apartment buildings along Southern Boulevard and Westchester Avenue sit above restaurants, groceries and fried-chicken shops, and German cockroaches spread upstairs through plumbing risers, electrical conduits and gaps behind kitchen cabinets.
Proximity to the Hunts Point markets and the Bruckner Expressway keeps rat activity high, especially in backyards and community gardens where compost and fallen produce attract rodents. The cool, damp basements typical of these old brick houses are ideal for silverfish, which chew on stored papers and cardboard. Pigeons are a daily presence on the Westchester Avenue elevated structure, and residents under the tracks often find droppings on sills and fire escapes.