Pest Control in Ridgewood, Queens
Ridgewood sits on the Brooklyn border, directly east of Bushwick, and shares much of its streetscape with its neighbor. Its most recognizable feature is block after block of three-story yellow and tan brick tenements, many protected in historic districts. Long home to German, Gottscheer, Italian, Polish and Romanian families, Ridgewood has attracted Latin American residents and, more recently, young renters priced out of North Brooklyn. Myrtle Avenue is the busy commercial strip, and Fresh Pond Road offers another shopping corridor. The M train runs on an elevated line through the neighborhood, and the L stops at Myrtle-Wyckoff Avenues on the western edge. Cafes, bars and music venues have multiplied in recent years.
About Ridgewood
Ridgewood was farmland until the late nineteenth century, when breweries and beer gardens clustered near the Brooklyn line. Between about 1905 and 1915 builders, most notably the G.X. Mathews Company, erected thousands of fireproof brick apartment buildings known as Mathews Model Flats, housing German immigrants moving out of crowded Williamsburg and Bushwick. The Dutch colonial Vander Ende-Onderdonk House, dating to around 1709, survives on Flushing Avenue as a reminder of the area's farming past.
Common Pest Problems in Ridgewood
Ridgewood's century-old brick tenements are the heart of its pest story. Although built to be fireproof, these buildings have shared walls, original plumbing chases and railroad-style layouts that let German cockroaches and mice move easily between apartments. Many buildings have converted basements and small backyards where trash is stored, attracting rats. The Myrtle Avenue shopping strip, with its bakeries, butchers and restaurants, supplies a steady food source, and rodents regularly spread from commercial basements into residential cellars on the side streets.
Pigeons are thick around the elevated M line, nesting on steel girders above Myrtle Avenue and Palmetto Street. Inside the older flats, cast-iron radiators and humid bathrooms create ideal conditions for silverfish, while tenants storing wool coats and blankets in deep prewar closets frequently discover clothes moths. Recent gut renovations of older buildings can temporarily worsen things for neighbors, pushing mice and roaches out of walls under construction and into adjoining apartments.