Meet New York's New Rat Czar

Kathleen Corradi’s anti-rat bona fides date to grade school, when she organized a petition drive to have her Long Island town do something about an infestation behind her house. Now, as I wrote with Joseph Pisani in The Wall Street Journal, she has been crowned New York City’s rat czar.

The 34-year-old beat out 900 other applicants for a position that, the job posting said, requires a “swashbuckling attitude, crafty humor, and general aura of badassery.” Mayor Eric Adams, who announced it earlier this month, has been vocal about his hatred of a rodent thought to number around two million in New York.

Cities that have long sought ways to curb rats increasingly lean on a clique of experts. The best of them can be inducted into the Pest Management Professional Hall of Fame. For a rat-control expert, a place like New York is the big leagues. The pest-control company Orkin last year ranked it the country’s second rattiest city, after Chicago, based on the number of rodent treatments performed. Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco squeaked into the top five.

Michael Parsons, an ecologist who has researched rodents for nearly a decade, got into the field after moving to New York from Australia, where he had studied kangaroos. “There weren’t a lot of kangaroos hopping around Times Square, but there’s a lot of rats,” he said. Now he is part of what he estimates are 100 scholarly rat experts in the world, who refer to themselves as rodentologists.

When the Democratic mayor announced in December that the city would name a rat czar, Parsons said, his inbox filled with messages from Tokyo to Paris asking whether he was seeking the job. He wasn’t. 

“I couldn’t apply knowing that you’re meant to be this bloodthirsty person with a swashbuckling attitude,” said Parsons, a visiting scholar at Fordham University. 

The finalists included people with experience in logistics and multi-agency oversight, and there was at least one exterminator, a City Hall official said. A few people pitched new technologies to fight rats, including an audio detection system.

The city was looking for “a maestro” to “coordinate this entire symphony of fighters” against rats, Adams said at the announcement.

Corradi studied biology in college and worked as an elementary-school teacher before taking a position working on rat mitigation in the city’s schools. Despite the job posting’s call for someone displaying “badassery,” she said she wouldn’t describe herself as bloodthirsty.

“You’ll be seeing a lot of me,” she promised, “and a lot less rats.”

THE HOME FRONT:

How it started — As an expecting and new father more than a decade ago, I wrote several articlesabout how sad it was that the New York State Museum was closed on Sundays. Eventually that decision was reversed.

How it’s going — Times Union columnist Chris Churchill has been writing columns about the sorry state of the museum, and the little kid I took there so often is now old enough to read the paper and write a letter to the editor.

THE QUESTION: Which exhibit did Andrew Cuomo take out of the State Museum?

Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.

THE LAST ANSWER: Joe Lhota was New York City’s first rat czar. He was named to lead an interagency task force of rat reduction in the summer of 2000, and his phone lit up when Rudy Giuliani referred to him as a “deputy mayor for rats” during an August interview on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”

I also accept as a correct the person who answered, “one could argue Master Splinter was the original leader of the rats (and turtles) in NYC.”