Explorations

I live in Brooklyn, New York. I live in between two  neighborhoods. One  called Bensonhurst and the other called Gravesend. Where I live and where I work are pretty close. My job is only six blocks from where I live. The environment where I live and work is sometimes clean and sometimes dirty. Sometimes the sidewalks a filthy. But if you walk down the avenue where I live you will always see a street cleaner once a week. That helps with all the mess and you will always see people outside their stores sweeping just like I do when I am home or working. There are also days where you will walk down my block or walking to my job and the streets are dirty and the odor is disgusting. There are only a few restaurants by my house. I have a few supermarkets on the avenue also. At night there are large piles of trash outside in the street waiting to be picked up whether its from private sanitation  or the city sanitation. Every night when I close up my job we put the trash out in the front and get it picked up by private sanitation. Something bad about my neighborhood is there isn’t a lot of those corner trash cans so that gives people more of an excuse to litter.

All these pictures show how much garbage there really is. This is just the amount of  waste

one neighborhood in Brooklyn.  We have a lot of people cleaning up the streets and the

the garbage always gets picked up. There is no sigh of rodent activity that I know of. I

haven’t seen any and I hope I don’t. I am pretty sure there are rodents. Every once in a

while you see a possum or you hear one going through the garbage. My neighborhood is

nothing like the neighborhood in the upper east side.

• My local environment around my house is around a lot of houses and businesses with Trees in front in Brookly, NY.
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• There are garbage cans almost every corner of each block.  There are signs of rodent activity in the night time when the garbage cans get too full And some peoples homes on this block arent well maintained.
• • This does concern me because my house is around all of this so the rats ca n get inside my house, and winter time is coming so the rats need some where to go. Many of the restaurants dump their garbage out front where it call attract rodents.
  • The area in the first article is different from my neighborhood because Borough Hall is a park and rodents often hide around those areas.  Where i live is a neighborhood with homes and businesses. There are no bushes and mostly only 2 trees per block.

I live in East Ehlmurst, Queens. A couple of overflowed trash cans were found around JacksonHeights. This is only a  couple of blocks away from where i live. Their was several environmental waste sources in about every corner of the block. Several  things are thrown in the trash cans, that can take a large amount of space. The garbage piles up until it is overflowed and thrown on the sidewalks. The restaraunt’s in my neighborhood produce a large  amount of  these waste’s.In every block their is about 4 to 5 restaurants. These small stores like the  99 cents stores throw away their trash in cheap plastic bags, which unfortunately breaks and piles on the ground. Many items in the trash can’s can be recycled. Before i had the chance to take any pictures  some people not too far away throw alot of furniture.  This can sometimes take alot of the sidewalk and even block parking spaces. There are alot of rodents where i live because the tremendous amount of restaurants and businesses. My neighborhood is a place where people love hanging out and its pretty live and wild on the weekends.Unfortunately because of this, their is several rats around the neighborhood. This seriously concerns me , i believe if we would clear the streets from trash piling on the corners, maybe this would decrease the rat populations. Sadly, this is a commercial place , where their are alot of restaurant and clubs so it would be way too hard to constantly have clear streets.In contrast to the first assignment the rodent population in my neighborhood isn’t that bad. In this previous articled it stated how the streets looked like it was moving.In my neighborhood, you wont see any rodents only around the restaurants around night. The rodents in my neighborhood aren’t as over exaggerated as in the article.

I live in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where I live with my parents in separate houses but in the same general area. There are many sources that people can throw their garbage at, however most buildings use a certain curb area to throw their garbage out on. Most of the Garbage piles are located in front or around housing building. We have garbage cans on corners, garbage bins set up for apartment buildings and recycling bins and machines in the local area.

Where I live at my dad’s is a pretty clean area except when garbage day approaches. The apartment building around throw their garbage out on the curb which isn’t visually pleasing but you get used to it. People also stop throwing stuff in the garbage cans but in the garbage piles. There are two super markets in an avenue radius both east and west. The supermarket in the picture is Fine Fare and does not really have garbage piles near it however it does have plastic and glass recycling bins right outside the entrance

There is a large street, E Houston St., which separates my dad’s and mom’s neighborhood, kind of. There is a gas station in the cross streets so lots of cars come by, which is also because the FDR is a few avenues away.

Now this is where the problem with rodents comes up. Hamilton Fish Park has garbage cans around the entrance and even recycling cans, but this is where I see a lot of rodent activity. There is a fence with foliage in it where the garbage cans are set up against. That provides them with a home that they can make borrows in and have easy access to food from the garbage. So that is why I took the pictures at night because that is when they are most active, but unfortunately I could not take a picture of them fast enough. This does concern me greatly because the rodents are living in an area that people of all ages play or hang out in, and that can cause diseases to spread. Also right across the street from the park is two apartment buildings that throw their garbage out on the curb before the garbage truck comes and picks it up. So this provides the rodents with a safe home and food for life basically.

On the corners of almost each block of both my parents neighborhood there is a garbage can, providing people the opportunity to not litter and keep our environment clean, but you can see in the pictures that the garbage cans are not full. Only the Garbage pile on the curbs in front and around apartment building seem to be where most of the loose  garbage ends up, because that is where some people in the neighborhood think it should go It also has a great effect on our rodent problem. The best thing we could do, which is happening already, is get rid of their homes and fill up the holes. The next thing, which has not been done, is find a better way to place our garbage for the garbage trucks. In our last assignment the map ,Rodent Raid, where rat activity was found by the health department, showed that the area that I lived in was highly active which I found not as a surprise, though I do hope it gets better.

-Majestic Rivas

I decided to take pictures of trash in my neighborhood. I live right in front of a main street in Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn NY. The reason I chose my neighborhood is because it’s always clean and very organized, but just one day could change that, Sunday. The garbage in my neighborhood gets picked up every night but Saturday nights. People in my neighborhood are not allowed to throw their trash on Saturdays and are supposed to wait until the next day (Sunday) to take out the trash. On Sundays the trash is everywhere, and the whole street reeks of garbage. The garbage is mostly consisted of food waste because there are 4 restaurants, 2 deli’s and 2 grocery stores in my neighborhood. It doesn’t concern me much, because I don’t see any rats. In the first article the rats were everywhere and the streets looked like they were moving, while in my street you might see one mouse running for its life, I really don’t see it as a problem but you never know. The pictures I took aren’t very clear because the only time I can take the pictures is on a Sunday night.                                                                                                    

My neighborhood has to leave their Garbage with or without pales. It comes every Tuesday and Thursday. You can see the pictures how people have left their garbage outside their houses. The garbage can that I took two pictures of is always overflowed and taken out maybe every week. It gets full in a day. The other is garbage that is left on the streets after the garbage men decide not to come. As you can see it gets quite disgusting. Sorry about some of the flashes at the top.

I have had problems with squirrels for the past 4 years. In my living room, there is an Air conditioner. It was a lovely one. It’s underneath my window so I don’t have to take it out and put it in every summer. That is when the squirrels attacked. They ravished through my Air conditioner, breaking it down enough that it could be their home. Because I live on the 3rd floor of a sharing family house, I can’t go outside and close the Air conditioner without a latter of some sort, nor can I take it out because it’s too heavy. So, I had to deal with the treacherous squirrels until I had finally gotten a latter. I plugged the Air conditioner with a piece of wood. After that, the Squirrels got restless. They banged on windows in the middle of the night, and randomly at day. I wish I was making this up. It got to the point where we had to put up electric wires around all the windows. We tried to call the city if they could do something about it. However, they said they couldn’t do anything. The wires slowed them down, but sometimes they still would come by the windows. They simply stopped after a few months. The difference in the Borough Hall Park and my house was that I wasn’t supplying them with food. They could be living off the mounds of garbage on the streets. After pulling up my Air conditioner they should have left. Instead they stayed with some type of ruthless spiteful agenda. Both are similar, the reading from the first and second assignment because they’re both in New York. New York City is notorious for it’s Rat problem. However in the first story, all they were going to do was put traps and baits. In the second one, they put poison. Apparently, the poison is the one that actually worked. This shows that more can and should be done pertaining to New York Subways.

Hello, well my name is Anesa and I decided to take pictures in the city of the local environment near my job, which is located in downtown Manhattan. The waste is as bad as I thought it would be mainly because downtown Manhattan is just overcrowded. There are plenty of garbage cans within the four blocks that I worked with. But I did notice large amounts of food wastes on the streets and on the sidewalks and also some garbage piles. As seen in the pictures I have taken, the city is not kept clean and this is not good for the environment. There is at least one garbage can on each block in the city but it is the people that don’t care to try and keep the city clean. I have not seen any rodents in this area of Manhattan therefore, I don’t know if there is as many in downtown Manhattan as opposed to the upper east side. Considering there are food wastes and garbage piles outside of building it wouldn’t be unlikely to come across rodents, but since majority of them are known to be in the upper east side I have not came across any in the downtown area of Manhattan.

I live in queens, the place i live is pretty clean and its mostly whites and asians that live here. There are many restuarants and fast food places around. In between four city blocks i counted 14 restuarants. I dont see rats around on the street, but i see squirrels everywhere and sometimes i even find dead ones on the floor.

I took pictures in the neighborhood where I live in Manhattan, of the garbage cans and the trash piles in the street. in the block there are many restaurants, stores and groceries, and different sources of food.I took the pictures in the morning and at night on a Sunday. As you can notice the garbage cans are all almost empty, this is a good thing because it means they came to change them often to avoid the trash on the street, but it is also because the pictures are took on weekend when there is less people around, during the week is much different. I also took some pictures of trash piles in the street at night, and as we can see there are a lot of them, and at every corner of the street. I think this is a problem, especially related to rats. at night you can see many rats around these piles looking for food and these piles are right out of the buildings, this means that there is the possibility that the rats can go in the houses too. Thus I believe it would be better for the neighborhood to find a way to avoid these trash piles standing for long time on the sidewalks. at night rats are running from one to the other. in this way they are just going to multiply in number every day. releating to the first assignment, my neighborhood is very close to the area with the rats problem on 2nd avenue, so I can just confirm, that it is needed to find a solution to this problem.

Sharry Mei

I live in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn. It is a very clean neighborhood because it is one of the small neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Dyker Heights mainly consists of one or two family houses. Everyone is really clean and they pick up after themselves, however the neighborhood that I work nearby, Bensonhurst is not as clean. Bensonhurst is a very diverse neighborhood. It is pretty filthy compared to Dyker Heights cause of the number of franchises and the amount of people. I go by Bensonhurst a lot and I usually do not see any rodent activity. I believe there aren’t many because usually there are a lot of neighborhood cleanup activities that are school affiliated. The trash is taken out daily. I do notice wasteful garbage such as coffee cups and drinks that are not fully finished. I cannot compare the first assignment to this because the neighborhood is not that unsanitary. I do not see any opportunity for interventions that would curb the rodent population but I am concern over the stray cat population; they smell bad and make loud screeches every few months; making love. Overall Bensonhurst isn’t a dirty neighborhood that would really have rodent activity.