Pest Control in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn

What makes pest work in Brooklyn Heights different from anywhere else?

The age of the fabric, and the fact that almost none of it stands alone.

The numbers are unusual even by New York standards. There were seven houses on the Heights in 1807. By 1860 there were over six hundred, built as the neighborhood turned itself into an early commuter suburb on the back of ferry service to Manhattan that began in 1814. More than six hundred pre-Civil War houses survive today, one of the largest ensembles of such housing anywhere in the United States, and NeighborhoodScout puts about 78.6 per cent of the residential stock at 1939 or earlier. This is a working neighborhood of buildings that predate modern plumbing, modern wiring, modern drainage and every building code that has ever governed any of them.

The second fact is subdivision. Despite the rowhouse reputation, roughly 80.4 per cent of the real estate here is classified as apartment buildings — not because the rowhouses were replaced, but because a great many of them were long ago cut into flats, and because apartment houses were built among them through the twentieth century. So the typical building is a nineteenth-century structure carrying twenty-first-century occupancy, with kitchens and bathrooms stacked onto plumbing lines that were improvised into it decades after it was built.

The third is that everything is attached. A detached house has four exterior walls and one owner. A rowhouse has two exterior walls, two party walls, and a neighbor on each side who has their own contractor, their own opinion about waste storage and their own idea of when the cellar was last looked at. Whatever you do to your building, the two beside it remain what they are.

Put those three together and you get the working principle for this market. The visible front of the house is the least important surface on it. The work is at the cellar, the areaway, the party walls, the rear elevation and the roof.

What does a shared party wall actually do to a pest problem?

It turns two buildings into one habitat, and it does so at every floor level rather than only at grade.

Here is the mechanism. In masonry rowhouse construction the floor joists of both adjoining buildings bear into the shared wall between them. The recess cut to receive each joist end is called a joist pocket. On nineteenth-century work those pockets were not sealed — there was no reason to seal them, and often no material at hand that would have done it. The result is a wall containing a row of small horizontal voids, spaced at joist centers, running the length of the building on both sides, and frequently connecting through where the masonry has settled, cracked or been cut into for later services.

A mouse in one house is therefore a mouse with access to the next. It does not need to cross a yard, climb a facade or find a gap under a door. It moves inside the wall, at whatever floor suits it, in a route that is warm in winter and invisible from both sides. The same voids carry bed bugs and, where the wall has been penetrated for plumbing or wiring, cockroaches.

This has three consequences that are worth stating directly, because they change what a sensible scope of work looks like.

Treating one house is treating half a habitat. Reducing the population on one side of a party wall applies pressure that pushes the remainder through it. Residents experience this as a problem that appears next door shortly after theirs is dealt with, or their own problem worsening after the neighbors had work done. Neither is coincidence.

Sealing the pockets is real work but it is finite. Closing joist pockets and party-wall penetrations is done from the accessible side, usually during renovation or where a ceiling or wall is open, using material that cannot be gnawed. It is not a caulk gun exercise. Done properly it is permanent, because it is a physical alteration to the building rather than a residue.

Cooperation between adjoining owners is worth more than any product. Two houses that seal their shared wall and coordinate their waste storage will outperform two houses that each buy a better service independently. On a block where several buildings do it, the difference is visible within a season.

Where does water get into a Heights rowhouse?

At the masonry front, at the roof and cornice, and at grade in the areaway and rear yard — and water is upstream of most of the structural insect activity we find here.

The rowhouse manual published by the Landmarks Preservation Commission states the general case plainly: water is the eventual cause of most masonry deterioration. It then sets out the specific vulnerability of the material that gives these houses their name. Brownstone — the reddish Jersey freestone quarried in Passaic County — is sedimentary, and its bedding layers run in a direction called the grain. When it was used as veneer, it was simpler and faster to set it with the grain vertical rather than horizontal. That single labor-saving decision is why brownstone fronts fail: water finds its way between the layers, freezes, expands and forces the stone apart layer by layer. Spalling exposes fresh surface to the next cycle, and it accelerates.

The horizontal details fail next. The manual notes that all horizontal surfaces on windows — sills and the tops of lintels — should be slightly pitched so water does not collect on them, and that a cornice exists to prevent rain and melted snow washing down the face of a building. On a house that has been repaired repeatedly over a hundred and sixty years, sills get replaced apartment, lintels get parged over, and cornices get patched, boxed in or removed entirely. Each of those changes converts a component that shed water into one that holds it.

What lives in the result is predictable. Damp concealed timber behind a masonry front is what carpenter ants excavate, because softened wood is easier to work and the moisture suits the brood. A colony behind a front wall is invisible from the street and from the room, and the only external sign is often a small accumulation of coarse excavated material on a sill or a floor below the gallery.

At grade the sources are more mundane and easier to fix. An areaway with a blocked drain holds water against the cellar wall. A rear yard that has been paved or raised over the years now falls toward the house instead of away from it. A downspout discharges at the base of a rear wall rather than into the drainage. Correcting any of those is not pest control in the way most people picture it, and it does more for a recurring problem than a further round of treatment.

Which services do Brooklyn Heights buildings need most?

In the order this housing stock generates them.

Rodent control comes first and divides in two. Norway rats work the block interiors, the areaways, the waste storage and the older cellar drainage; the city Health Department is direct about the driver, noting that exposed garbage attracts rats and that owners are legally required to keep them out of buildings. House mice work the party walls and the interior voids, and they are the reason a scrupulously clean house on a quiet street still gets them.

Structural exclusion is second in the list and first in importance, because it is what makes everything else durable. Here it means the cellar line, the areaway, the service penetrations, the joist pockets where they can be reached, the roof bulkhead and any breach in a party wall.

Cockroach control is third. In converted rowhouses this is a German cockroach problem centered on the shared wet stack, and it needs monitoring and sealing across all the units on the line rather than treatment in the apartment that complained. Cellars produce American and Oriental cockroaches instead, which are a drainage and damp problem.

Bed bug treatment is fourth and, in a multi-unit conversion, always a neighboring-unit question from day one.

Wildlife management covers roof and cornice level, principally eastern gray squirrels using street trees and parapets, and occasionally raccoons in the larger roof structures. The removal is booked with a licensed wildlife partner firm; the cornice and parapet work behind it is Graduate’s.

Ant control deals with pavement ants in areaway and garden paving joints and odorous house ants following moisture indoors, and wasp and hornet removal with nests at cornices, bulkheads and rear extensions.

Businesses along Montague Street, Henry Street and Atlantic Avenue run through the commercial program and, for food premises, restaurant pest control. Managed buildings sit under co-op and condo pest control.

Which parts of Brooklyn Heights do we serve?

All of the district and the streets around it. The character shifts noticeably from north to south.

The Fruit Streets — Cranberry, Orange and Pineapple — hold some of the oldest and smallest fabric in the neighborhood, including the surviving two-and-a-half story late Federal houses. Small buildings, shallow cellars, close-packed party walls.

Columbia Heights and the Promenade frontage face the harbor above the bluff, with the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway running in its cantilevered structure below. Larger houses and apartment buildings, deep rear yards on the inland side, and weather exposure from the west that the interior streets do not get.

Willow Street and Willowtown carry the mixture the historic district was designated to protect: Federal, Greek Revival, Italianate, Second Empire, Victorian Gothic, Romanesque, Neo-Grec and Classical Revival standing side by side, which means several different wall assemblies in a single blockfront.

Montague Street is the commercial spine, with retail and food service at ground level under residential floors — the classic mixed-use arrangement in which a residential rodent complaint frequently has a commercial source.

Remsen, Joralemon and Grace Court run toward the southern and eastern edges, generally larger and later houses with deeper plans.

Atlantic Avenue forms the southern boundary and is a busy mixed commercial corridor in its own right. Cadman Plaza West and the blocks toward Borough Hall bring in mid-century apartment buildings and institutional structures on a completely different scale.

Our full coverage list shows the whole service area, and the New York City hub explains how city work is organized. The closest comparable market is Park Slope, another largely intact rowhouse neighborhood with the same shared-wall arithmetic; across the river the Upper East Side is the vertical version of the same problem. For contrast, our detached-house markets on Long Island — Great Neck, Manhasset, Port Washington, Garden City and Huntington — are perimeter work, and the Long Island hub sets out how that differs.

What does landmark status mean for the materials we can use?

It constrains the visible exterior and leaves almost everything that matters untouched — which is a better position than most owners assume before they ask.

Brooklyn Heights was designated New York City’s first historic district in November 1965, made a National Historic Landmark District in January 1965 and added to the National Register in October 1966. The district runs from Atlantic Avenue to Fulton Street and from the East River to Court Street, and it was recognized as an early commuter suburb and a remarkably well-preserved nineteenth-century streetscape. In practice that means work altering the appearance of a building’s exterior can require review, and it means an owner cannot simply screw a sheet of galvanised mesh across a decorative feature and call the job finished.

Three things follow.

Most exclusion work is invisible from the street anyway. The cellar, the areaway floor and drain, the rear elevation, the party-wall pockets, the service penetrations, the roof bulkhead and the interior of a cornice return are not the protected streetscape in any meaningful sense. The overwhelming majority of a scope of works on a house like this sits in those places.

Where the front is involved, material choice does the work. Repointing an open mortar joint with an appropriate mortar is both a preservation repair and a pest exclusion measure, and the two goals do not conflict. Copper and stainless mesh can be set back and concealed within an opening rather than applied across it. A weep hole or a vent that must stay open for drainage gets screened rather than sealed — a distinction that is got wrong more often than any other detail in this trade, and one that a preservation-minded owner tends to grasp immediately.

Materials that fail here fail publicly. Expanding foam is the standard error and we will not put it in a wall: rodents chew straight through cured foam, and on a landmarked front it is also visible, discoloured and ugly within a season. Ordinary steel wool rusts and stains down the face of the stone. Silicone or acrylic caulk is a fine sealant over a real barrier and useless as the barrier itself. On a nineteenth-century masonry building, anything an animal can bite through is not a barrier, however tidy it looks on the day it goes in.

The other thing landmark status does is slow everything down, which is worth planning around. If a scope of work touches the visible exterior, the review timeline becomes part of the schedule, and a job that could have been done in October gets done in March. That is a reason to survey early rather than to wait for evidence to become undeniable — and a reason to do the concealed work, which needs no review at all, while any exterior element is still in process.

One further point about the fabric itself. The district covers Federal, Greek Revival, Italianate, Second Empire, Victorian Gothic, Romanesque, Neo-Grec and Classical Revival houses, and adjoining buildings frequently come from different decades and different builders. That variety is the reason we do not price this work from a template. Two houses that look alike from the sidewalk can have entirely different cellar construction, entirely different rear extensions and entirely different histories of alteration behind the front wall.

What do the block interiors and rear yards mean for rat pressure?

They mean the relevant unit of geography is the block, not the lot — which is the single most useful thing a homeowner here can understand.

A Brooklyn Heights block is a ring of attached buildings around a shared interior of back yards. From a rat’s point of view that interior is one continuous habitat: soft ground to burrow in, dense planting for cover, fences that are barriers to people and irrelevant to animals, and a supply of food that only has to be reliable at one or two properties out of thirty for the whole interior to support a population. The Health Department’s guidance is that rats want food, water, shelter and safe ways to move around, and a block interior supplies all four.

That has practical consequences.

Your own yard can be immaculate and you can still have rats. They are not resident in your yard; they are resident in the block and passing through it. Removing your own attractants reduces your share and does not remove the population.

Burrows are where the evidence is. An active burrow is a hole roughly two to four inches across at the base of a wall, under a shed or slab, or in a planted bed, usually with a fan of loose earth outside it and a smooth, clear run leading away. Fresh burrows have clean edges and no cobwebs across the mouth. Filling one without addressing the food supply simply relocates it.

Waste storage is the lever. Hard-sided, close-fitting, rat-resistant containers at every property on the block interior will do more than any treatment. This is a collective problem, and on blocks where a residents’ association takes it on, results follow.

Your building work is still worth doing. Sealing the cellar line, closing the service penetrations, repairing the areaway drain and fixing broken drainage is what determines whether the animals in the block interior get inside your house. You cannot control the block. You can control whether it comes indoors.

What changes when a rowhouse holds several apartments?

The legal position changes, and so does the sensible scope of work.

A building arranged for occupancy by three or more independent households is generally a multiple dwelling, and that classification carries obligations that a single-family house does not. The Housing Maintenance Code places the duty to keep a dwelling free from rodents, insects and other pests on the owner, and requires extermination where infestation is present — the detail is at NYC Housing Maintenance Code — extermination and rodent eradication.

Local Law 55 of 2018, the Asthma Free Housing Act, adds a scheduled duty on top of the reactive one. Owners must investigate dwelling units and common areas at least annually and whenever a complaint arises, and must remediate using integrated pest management: removing nests and debris physically, sealing openings so gaps are a quarter inch or less, and eliminating the water sources pests depend on. The law is explicit that pesticide application does not substitute for those measures. In a converted rowhouse that provision is unusually well aimed, because a quarter-inch standard applied honestly means closing the very penetrations that carry the traffic.

There is also an annual filing. Owners of multiple dwellings, co-ops and condominiums included, file a bedbug annual report with HPD each December under Housing Maintenance Code sections 27-2018.1 and 27-2018.2, covering the number of units, the number infested, the number where eradication occurred and the number reinfested, and then either give the filing receipt to occupants at lease commencement or renewal or post it prominently.

Where pesticides are applied in a multiple dwelling, notification rules apply — see Local Law 36 pesticide notification and the New York neighbor notification law. Boards should read co-op and condo board obligations; owners letting units should read landlord and tenant pest responsibilities; anyone comparing bids should read choosing a pest control contractor.

When should the work be done through the year?

Evidence dictates urgency, but the calendar changes what is possible and what a result costs.

Late summer to late autumn is the rodent window. Cooling weather moves rats and mice toward buildings, and a cellar sealed in September never acquires the winter population in the first place. It is also the best time to survey block interiors, because the planting has grown enough to show which parts of it are actually being used and the ground is still workable.

Winter brings insects indoors and makes them findable. It is also the season when a building’s heat loss reveals its openings — a cold morning shows you where warm air is escaping, and those points are frequently the same ones the animals are using.

Spring is the masonry season. A winter of freeze-thaw cycling leaves its record on brownstone fronts, parapets, sills and cornices, and that is the moment to correct spalling, repoint open joints and repair the flashing and cornice details that are wetting concealed timber. Doing it now removes the condition before the summer insect season exploits it.

Summer is for exterior and garden work: regrading a rear yard that now falls toward the house, clearing and repairing areaway drains, rebuilding waste storage, and reducing standing water in planters, roof drains and covers for mosquito control.

How we came to work this way

Since 1983 Graduate Pest Control has been working on buildings in the five boroughs and out across Nassau and Suffolk. Arnold Katz founded it, having read entomology to degree level at the University of Georgia, and his son Ryan Katz has led it since. The whole method compresses into one of Ryan’s sentences: we treat every job as a building problem, not a pest problem.

There is nowhere that idea is easier to demonstrate than on a Brooklyn Heights block. These houses have been standing since before the Civil War. They have been divided, reunited, re-plumbed, re-roofed, extended into their yards and cut into for services by every trade that has passed through in a hundred and sixty years. Every one of those events left a seam, and the seams are where the animals live. The house is a record of its own alterations, and reading it is faster than chasing what comes out of it.

If you want a straight assessment of your building and where its pathways actually run, get in touch. If you would rather begin from a particular pest, the pest control index lists the services in full.

Services in Brooklyn Heights

• Rodent Control
• Cockroach Control
• Bed Bug Treatment
• Structural Exclusion
• Wildlife Management
• Ant Control

Nearby areas we serve

• Park Slope
• Williamsburg
• Cobble Hill
• Dumbo

All New York City service areas