Pest Control in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan
Hell's Kitchen, also called Clinton, stretches along Manhattan's West Side roughly from 34th Street to 59th Street between Eighth Avenue and the Hudson River. Ninth Avenue is its restaurant row, with an extraordinary variety of cuisines, bars and cafes serving theatergoers and locals alike. The neighborhood is home to many actors, stagehands and performers who work in the nearby Broadway theaters, and it has a strong LGBTQ community. Tenement walk-ups remain common, while new towers have risen near the river and along 42nd Street. Transit includes the A, C and E on Eighth Avenue, the 7 at 34th Street-Hudson Yards and the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Also known as: Clinton, Midtown West.
About Hell's Kitchen
Hell's Kitchen developed in the mid-nineteenth century as a rough working-class district of Irish and German immigrants who worked on the docks, railroads and slaughterhouses along the Hudson. It gained a reputation for gangs and poverty, which the name reflects. In the twentieth century it became home to Italian, Greek and Puerto Rican families. Special zoning in the 1970s aimed to protect residents from Midtown expansion as the area gentrified.
Common Pest Problems in Hell's Kitchen
With restaurant after restaurant on Ninth and Tenth Avenues, Hell's Kitchen produces massive volumes of food waste, and Norway rats are a visible presence along the avenues and in tree pits. Many tenement buildings have restaurants in their ground floors, so German cockroaches easily travel up shared plumbing into apartments. Mice take advantage of old walls and gaps around pipes. Crowds from the theaters add even more street litter each night.
Construction near the Hudson Yards border and along the far West Side disturbs rodents and sends them into established blocks. Pigeons gather near the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the elevated ramps, and roost on fire escapes and tenement cornices. Prewar walk-ups with older plumbing and limited ventilation have humid bathrooms and basements where silverfish flourish. Rear yards behind rowhouses on the side streets and small green spaces like DeWitt Clinton Park also give rats places to burrow.