Pest Control in University Heights, Bronx
University Heights sits on a ridge above the Harlem River in the West Bronx, roughly between the Major Deegan Expressway and Jerome Avenue, from Burnside Avenue north toward Fordham Road. Its centerpiece is the campus of Bronx Community College, which includes the domed Gould Memorial Library and the open-air colonnade of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. University Avenue and Sedgwick Avenue run along the ridge, and the Old Croton Aqueduct Walk traces a green path through the neighborhood. The 4 train stops at Burnside Avenue and 183rd Street, and Metro-North's Hudson Line serves University Heights station by the bridge of the same name. Residents are mostly Dominican, Puerto Rican and West African.
Also known as: U-Heights.
About University Heights
New York University bought land here in the 1890s and built an uptown campus with buildings designed by Stanford White, which gave the neighborhood its name. The university stayed until 1973, when financial troubles forced it to sell the campus to the City University, which established Bronx Community College there. Apartment buildings went up around the campus after the Jerome Avenue subway opened in 1917, replacing country estates and a few frame houses.
Common Pest Problems in University Heights
Large prewar apartment buildings dominate University Heights, and German cockroaches and mice move through them via shared pipes, old incinerator chutes and cracked plaster. Tenants on the upper stretches of University and Sedgwick Avenues often deal with persistent roach problems that only improve when an entire building is treated together. Rats are most active around trash storage areas and in the unkempt slopes that drop toward the Major Deegan Expressway and the river.
The campus lawns and the trees along the Aqueduct Walk shelter squirrels, which can invade attics of the neighborhood's remaining frame houses and top-floor apartments with gaps at the roofline. Basement apartments and storage rooms in buildings on the ridge tend to stay cool and damp, conditions where silverfish multiply, often discovered in bathtubs or among stored papers and textbooks. Buildings that back onto the college grounds or the aqueduct path also see more rodent traffic from those green spaces, especially in the fall, when mice move indoors as nights turn cold.