NYC Rat Tours – What to Wear

New York City. The Big Apple that never sleeps. But if you get bored with all that awake-time, you might just find yourself engaging in the newest form of NY tourism; NY rat tours.

Yes. Rat tourism. Apparently there are rat enthusiasts in the world, and as most New Yorkers know, there are enough rats in the city to unionize.

Kenny Bollwerk is our pioneer of the putrid in this case, a TikToker who, in two hours of live filming the city streets, had made a name for himself as a “rat tour guide.” He got 10,000 people watching rats in garbage bags, rats running over peoples’ feet, rats running at him, him running from rats (okay, so I made that last part up.)

What he was doing took off, with aficionados having him go out every other night, taking actual people on tours, whole nine. It’s become a thing.

As much as this sounds like nihilistic schadenfreude, he wasn’t just trying to give the city a black eye. Kenny, like all New Yorkers, are plagued with rats, and the Mayor’s office was hard pressed to stop it. Little known fact: there are so many rats in New York that uptown rats and downtown rats have evolved away from each other.

This might be a little tongue in check, maybe a bit absurd, but rats are no joke. They carry lots of diseases, and when they’re in a mood to party, they wipe out a third of Europe. I guess rat tourism sounds like a fun thing for people that aren’t sharing breakfast with them.

But this a good news story, maybe. Could be in response to this nascent rat tourism, could be just exhaustion from all the complaints, but NYC Mayor Eric Adams appointed a “rat czar” by the name of Kathleen Corradi. She’s bloodthirsty, ruthless, and may hit the shiny red button of asking NYC businesses to throw their garbage bags into an actual bin instead of the street. Dark days ahead for anyone not in the garbage bin business.