Pest Control in Two Bridges, Manhattan
Two Bridges takes its name from its location between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges along the East River, extending north toward the Lower East Side and west into Chinatown. It is a largely residential neighborhood dominated by public housing developments such as the Alfred E. Smith Houses and LaGuardia Houses, along with Mitchell-Lama cooperatives and a few tenement blocks around Market and Madison Streets. In recent years very tall luxury towers have risen along South Street, changing the skyline. Residents include many Chinese, Latino and longtime working-class families. The East River Esplanade offers waterfront walking paths, and the F train at East Broadway serves the area.
Also known as: Lower East Side waterfront.
About Two Bridges
The waterfront here was once busy with shipyards and maritime trades, and the streets behind it filled with immigrant tenements in the nineteenth century. Mid-twentieth-century slum clearance replaced much of that housing with large public projects, including the Smith Houses completed in 1953. The name Two Bridges came into use in the 1950s and 1960s through a neighborhood council, and the area was designated an urban renewal area that brought more affordable housing.
Common Pest Problems in Two Bridges
Large housing developments with open lawns, shrubs and centralized trash compactor areas are prime habitat for Norway rats, and the East River waterfront adds another corridor where rats travel along seawalls and under the esplanade. The approaches to the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges have shadowy spaces and structural cavities where rodents and pigeons thrive. New construction on the waterfront has disturbed soil and pushed rats into nearby blocks. Riverfront seawalls give them hiding places.
Inside older high-rise and tenement buildings, German cockroaches and house mice spread through trash chutes, pipe chases and shared walls. Pigeons roost heavily beneath the bridge approaches and on building ledges, making bird-control a common concern. Ground-floor and basement apartments close to the river can be damp, which encourages house centipedes that hunt insects in bathrooms and laundry areas. Keeping compactor rooms clean and chute doors closed is one of the simplest ways to limit spread in these towers.