The pint-sized gangsters that won’t leave Riverdale

Grey rats in tiny silk suits are smoking cigarettes and drinking excellent Scotch right across the street from the front doors of our wonderful P.S. 24 school in South Riverdale and behind the back end of P.S./M.S. 141. These guys are hanging around and plotting various nefarious schemes to build illegal casino joints for the blue jays and robins to gamble away their treasure troves of worms and grasshoppers, in full view of our school children.  

Okay, a ridiculous lie, but I’d prefer that bizarre and sordid comic-book spectacle over the reality. What we’ve got is an all-you-can-eat buffet parked on 236th Street in the weekday afternoon hours -- the trash from the Riverdale Kingsbridge Academy.  The rats, whom I have seen anywhere from 5:30 to 6 pm, when I pick up my daughter at the YCares program at P.S. 24, skulk around in the crevices of the boulder facing the front door of the school. Their home is in a small New York City park called Riverdale Playground. They crawl out of their nests in the boulder, under the dead leaves and discarded cement blocks in the southeastern corner of the park near the fence bordering RKA, to look for food and possibly sample the snacks on display in the school’s clear plastic garbage bags.

Rats don’t hold any charm. Even the common squirrel possesses more likability in one claw than a rat holds in its whole body. Rats inspire frozen shock and disgust in most of us, especially when you consider that they are living very close to our children during school hours. 

That’s my first thought. My second is to think about how we can get rid of them.  So I brainstormed some ideas for the community to consider:

• Build affordable housing for them in the middle of the Metro-North train tracks. The Third Rail would be a good spot.

• Organize the rats into competitive teams and see which ones can swim the farthest distance into the Hudson River.

• Buy a wild animal to eat them. A honey badger, wolverine or 600 lb. Bengal tiger would do.

• FedEx the rats to Russia.

• Build a rocket ship filled with peanut butter and chocolate. Open it up for the rats, and then quickly blast off for Pluto.

• Set the rats up with their own reality television show.  The show could focus on which of them needs a makeover (all of them!) and their Hatfield/McCoy-like competition with the squirrels.

• Frack the boulder. The smell of the gas alone should clear them out of the area.

Since none of these ideas will work (except the reality TV show is a winner, I’m telling you), how about asking the Parks Department to consider hiring an exterminator to destroy this potential menace to public health? Unlike me, an exterminator has good tools for getting rid of rats. Like an electric chair.

Mike Gold lives and works in the Bronx.