Pest Control in Dumbo, Brooklyn

Why is a Dumbo apartment a factory problem rather than a housing problem?

Because the building was a factory, and the apartment is a recent guest in it.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the DUMBO Historic District on 18 December 2007, Designation List 399, covering roughly ninety-one historically significant buildings on the East River waterfront between the Fulton Ferry district to the west and Vinegar Hill to the east. What it protects is industrial: coffee roasting and sugar refining for Arbuckle Brothers, paper boxes and printing for the Robert Gair Company, shoes for Hanan & Son with 1,131 employees in 1913, machinery for E.W. Bliss with 1,646, soap for Kirkman, groceries for Jones Brothers. Three of the ten Brooklyn industrial establishments employing more than a thousand people in 1913 were in these few blocks.

The manufacturers left between the wars — Gair to Piermont in 1927, Bliss to Toledo in 1933, Hanan bankrupt in 1935. Artists moved into the empty floors from the late 1970s, the acronym was coined in 1978, Two Trees acquired the Gair complex from 1981, and residential conversion accelerated from 1998.

The housing numbers still carry the fingerprints of that history. NeighborhoodScout classifies 97.2 per cent of Dumbo residential real estate as large apartment buildings, with 91.8 per cent of units at studio to two bedrooms. Point2Homes counts 2,375 housing units and 4,497 residents at a median construction year of 1956, with 40.2 per cent of units in pre-1940 buildings and 57.5 per cent of all units in buildings of fifty or more, against 1.3 per cent single-family detached. Those last two figures describe the same buildings. A pre-1940 structure holding fifty or more households is not a pre-war apartment house here; it is a warehouse with apartments in it.

That single fact reorganises the entire survey. We are not looking for the domestic geography of a residential building. We are looking for the industrial geography still sitting underneath the finishes.

What does a concrete building change about exclusion?

It changes the fundamental question from what is being chewed to what was already open.

The reinforced-concrete stock here is nationally early. The designation report places the Gair buildings among the earliest large-scale reinforced-concrete factory buildings erected in the United States: 41-49 Washington Street in 1904 to William Higginson’s design, put up by Turner Construction as the first multi-story factory that firm built and the job that made its reputation in concrete, then 51-59 Washington Street in 1908, 70 Washington in 1910-11, 40-58 Washington in 1913-14, 1 Main Street in 1914, 35-41 Main and 27 York in 1916 and 45 Main in 1919. Alongside them stand the nineteenth-century slow-burning mills the report describes as massive wooden posts and beams behind brick facades — 22-38 Washington Street, built 1887 to 1891 for Robert Gair to Benjamin Finkensieper’s design, is the type.

For exclusion work those two systems behave in opposite ways, and both of them are unlike a house.

Concrete offers almost nothing to gnaw. There is no sill plate, no band joist, no cedar shingle, no soft mortar in a rubble foundation. What a rodent uses instead is an opening that already exists: a cold joint between two pours, a cast-in sleeve that was never packed, the annulus around a pipe a later trade cored through a slab, a redundant duct, the base or head of a shaft. The good news is that the list of possible openings on a concrete building is finite and findable. The bad news is that each one is a hole through a structural element, so the fix has to respect the structure as well as close the route.

Heavy timber offers cavity rather than substrate. Massive framing produces deep floor assemblies, and when a loft was subdivided the new ceiling almost always went below the old structure rather than into it. That leaves a horizontal void running the full width of the floorplate, above the ceiling of every apartment on the level and continuous across the partitions between them.

Neither system is what the finishes suggest. A resident sees painted plasterboard and assumes an ordinary wall. Behind it is either a slab with holes in it or a timber deck with a plenum over it, and which of the two decides where a monitor goes.

One further consequence is easy to miss. Because concrete does not rot the way frame construction does, water damage here shows up late and shows up somewhere else. A parapet or roof drain leaking into a heavy-timber bay wets yellow pine that holds moisture for months, and softened concealed timber behind masonry is what carpenter ants excavate.

What did the freight equipment leave behind?

Vertical shafts, doorways sized for vehicles and rail, and floorplates measured in acres. All three are still in the buildings.

The designation report is specific about how these places worked: ground-level vehicular entrances, wide segmental-arch loading docks, steam freight elevators, and building entries built for rail cars. The Jay Street Connecting Railroad, established in 1904, ran from the waterfront into the buildings themselves — into the Bliss foundry at 202-206 Plymouth Street, for one — and its track is still inset in the Belgian block on several streets.

The shafts rarely go away. Sometimes a freight elevator still serves the building. Sometimes it was decommissioned and the shaft floored over at a level or two and forgotten. Sometimes the enclosure survives with pipe and cable threaded down it, which is the worst of the three, because a shaft that has been repeatedly cut into is a shaft with an opening at every floor. Whatever happened to it, the result is a continuous route from cellar to roof that is warm in winter, unlit and visited by nobody.

The loading threshold is a door built for a truck. A segmental-arch dock and a vehicular entrance are openings a meter or more wide at street level, in a district where the street surface itself is jointed stone. However carefully a conversion glazed and framed those openings, the threshold detail at the bottom of them is where a Norway rat meets the building.

The floorplates were built open and stayed open. The report describes relatively open and flexible floors for manufacturing and storage. The Grand Union warehouse at 68 Jay Street had ten acres of floorspace; E.W. Bliss occupied 186,500 square feet of manufacturing space at 135 Plymouth Street. Apartments made inside a floorplate of that size are partitions standing in a room, and partitions built to a dropped ceiling rather than to the structure leave the level continuous above every one of them.

Put those together and the reason unit-by-unit work fails here is not mysterious. Pressure applied in one flat moves a population along a plenum, down a shaft or across a core into the next one. Nothing has been resolved; something has been relocated, and the resident who reports it next is simply the one with the lower tolerance.

What does it mean that this ground is made land?

It means the neighborhood is standing on its own former shoreline, and the water knows it.

For most of its history this was salt marsh, and Water Street marks the former waterline. The city began selling underwater lots in 1686 to private owners who filled them to build wharves; the Empire Stores site was filled in three separate episodes between about 1796 and 1850. Everything north of Water Street therefore sits on made ground over former tidal land.

Fill behaves differently from undisturbed glacial ground in three ways that matter to a building. It settles, unevenly and over long periods, which opens joints in slabs, paving and buried drainage that were tight when they were laid. It drains differently, holding water in some places and moving it fast in others depending on what was tipped where a hundred and fifty years ago. And it sits at a level determined by whoever filled it, not by geology, which is why the ground floors along this waterfront are as close to mean water as they are.

None of that is a defect to correct. It is the condition to work with, and it explains why the below-grade parts of these buildings are the wettest fabric in any of our Brooklyn markets — and why Oriental and American cockroaches, damp and drainage species rather than kitchen species, are a permanent feature of cellars here rather than an occasional visitor.

The northern edge makes the point the other way. Brooklyn Bridge Park includes a constructed salt marsh at Pier 1, planted with smooth cordgrass and deliberately maintained as marsh rather than allowed to accrete seaward, there to support coastal wildlife and take the force off the shoreline. It is good design. It is also a permanent vegetated tidal margin at the edge of a dense built neighborhood, which is a habitat boundary and needs treating as one.

What did the 2012 flood actually do to these buildings?

It filled the below-grade level with seawater, and it demonstrated the exposure rather than creating it.

The record from the last week of October 2012 is specific. The East River surge inundated Main Street and Old Fulton Street. A shop at Main and Water took at least four feet of water inside the storefront and lost its windows. A resident of 1 Main Street reported five feet in the lobby and the basement, and the whole building flooded. The basement under Jane’s Carousel took about five feet and lost its electronics. Twenty Jay Street closed indefinitely. Multiple basements on lower Old Fulton Street filled with seawater.

Set that against the city’s own numbers. The hazard mitigation plan puts roughly 61,700 buildings and about 192,000 residential units, housing more than 440,000 residents, inside the one per cent annual chance floodplain, and models 14,350 Brooklyn buildings as sustaining damage in such an event — around 23 per cent of the borough’s modeled damage. It identifies structures with basement and cellar spaces as particularly vulnerable, and projects sea level rising as much as 30 inches by the 2050s and up to 4.8 feet by the 2080s.

For pest work the consequences are practical rather than dramatic.

A flooded cellar is a rebuilt cellar. Every flood event is followed by drying, stripping, replacement of services and re-fitting, and each of those is a trade cutting new penetrations under time pressure. The openings created in the eighteen months after a flood are frequently the openings we find five years later.

Mechanical plant moves upward, and it takes routes with it. Where equipment has been relocated out of a basement, the risers, conduit and drainage serving it were re-run through the building. New vertical services are new vertical routes, and they were installed by people solving a flood problem, not a pest problem.

Drainage takes salt water and then takes silt. A drainage connection under a jointed stone street, on fill, that has been surcharged with river water is not the drainage that was laid. Rodents commonly enter buildings from below through failed traps and broken or disconnected lines, and that route is untouched by anything applied outdoors. In this neighborhood a rodent problem with no plausible exterior route is a plumbing finding until proven otherwise.

Which services do Dumbo buildings actually need?

In the order this fabric generates them.

Rodent control is first and splits by route rather than by species. Norway rats belong to the loading thresholds, the vehicular entrances, the jointed paving, the waterfront edge and the drainage below; NYC Health states that rats need food, water, shelter and safe ways to get around, that garbage and clutter give them somewhere to hide, and that owners are legally required to keep them out. House mice belong to the shafts, cores and ceiling plenums, and Cornell records fifty to sixty droppings a day from one animal, which is why a top-floor apartment with an immaculate kitchen still produces evidence.

Structural exclusion is second in sequence and first in value, because it is what makes anything else durable. Here it means the base and head of every shaft, the collars on stacks retrofitted through slabs and timber decks, the cast-in sleeves, the loading thresholds and vehicular doors, the cellar-to-street boundary and the roof bulkhead.

Cockroach control divides by level. German cockroaches are a stack problem in a building that had no domestic plumbing at all until conversion, so the scope covers every apartment on a line plus any ground-floor food tenancy. Oriental and American cockroaches are a below-grade damp and drainage problem, and on this ground they are close to permanent unless the drainage is addressed.

Bed bug treatment starts as a neighboring-unit question, because the structure between apartments is frequently not what the floor plan shows. Bed bugs use the same conduit and core runs as everything else.

Ant control here is largely pavement ants nesting in the joints of granite block paving and coming in at thresholds, with odorous house ants following a moisture line indoors.

Wildlife management is roof-level work — parapets, bulkheads and mechanical enclosures, with the animal handled by a licensed wildlife partner and the closure done by us — and wasp and hornet removal covers nests at parapets, terraces and roof plant. Mosquito management is roof and terrace source reduction rather than garden work.

Ground-floor retail and food tenancies run through the commercial program and, for food premises, restaurant pest control. Boards and managing agents of converted buildings sit under co-op and condo pest control and property management pest control, and the hotels along this waterfront under hotel and hospitality pest control.

Which parts of Dumbo do we cover?

The historic district and the blocks around it, and the buildings change type as you move east and south.

Water Street and Main Street are the waterfront frontage and the flood edge, with the Empire Stores, the carousel and 1 Main Street of 1914 among them. This is the lowest and wettest ground in the neighborhood and the most likely to have been rebuilt below grade.

Washington Street carries the Gair concrete sequence from 1904 through 1913-14, alongside the 1887-91 timber mill at 22-38. Two entirely different structural systems on one blockfront.

Front Street and Plymouth Street hold the older brick and timber stock and some of the largest single floorplates, including the Bliss buildings at 135 and 202-206 Plymouth with rail track that once ran indoors. Jay Street and York Street run inland toward the subway and hold the 1909 and 1916 concrete buildings and the Grand Union warehouse at 68 Jay.

Pearl Street and Adams Street sit under and beside the Manhattan Bridge, whose Brooklyn anchorage and support pier stand inside the district and are, in the designation report’s words, a major presence that strongly contributes to its sense of place. The bridge opened in 1909 and carries roughly 150,000 vehicles a day.

Old Fulton Street and the Fulton Ferry edge form the western boundary, where the district meets Brooklyn Heights at the foot of the bluff and where several basements filled in 2012. Bridge Street is the eastern edge against Vinegar Hill, and Brooklyn Bridge Park runs the northern boundary with its tidal margin.

Every market we cover appears on the coverage list, and the New York City hub sets out how the five-borough work is structured. Directly uphill, Brooklyn Heights is the attached-rowhouse opposite of everything on this page; Cobble Hill is that same rowhouse fabric at its oldest and narrowest; Park Slope adds a drainage gradient to it; Williamsburg is the other Brooklyn waterfront market where new towers stand beside old small buildings. In Manhattan, Tribeca and SoHo are the nearest relatives — nineteenth-century commercial fabric converted to housing — though neither sits on a tidal flood edge. For the contrast with detached houses, see the Long Island hub.

What do the cobblestones do at street level?

They put a jointed surface, and in places no sidewalk at all, at the exact point where these buildings meet the ground.

Original granite Belgian block paving survives on many Dumbo streets. The designation report notes that some streets have no sidewalks, which it suggests may be unique in New York City, and that Belgian block sidewalk paving is not known to appear in any other New York neighborhood. A $108 million rehabilitation of the cobblestone streets was completed in 2025.

Belgian block is not a monolithic surface. It is a field of stones set in bedding material over fill, and every joint between them is a void that leads downward. Three things follow.

Ants nest in it. Pavement ants working paving joints is ordinary urban entomology; what is not ordinary is that here the paving frequently runs uninterrupted to a doorway, with no concrete sidewalk between the nesting surface and the building line.

Rats travel and burrow at the margins. NYC Health’s advice is to check for cracks and holes in the foundation of a building, in the sidewalk and under doors, and to repair them by filling and sealing. On a street of set stone, the equivalent points are the perimeter joints where paving abuts a building, a curb, a rail or a utility cover, because those are where the bedding is most easily lost.

Repaving is disturbance. Works on a stone street lift the surface, disturb the bedding, expose the fill and the buried services, then close it again. That does not create a rodent population, but it displaces one, and buildings alongside feel it within weeks rather than seasons.

What changes when the bins come off the curb?

More than most people expect, and Dumbo is in the first Brooklyn district where it happens.

Dumbo sits in Brooklyn Community District 2, along with Downtown Brooklyn, Brooklyn Heights, Vinegar Hill, Boerum Hill, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Fulton Ferry and the Navy Yard. The Department of Sanitation named BK2 as the first Brooklyn district for Empire Bins — stationary on-street containers with keycard access, emptied by automated side-loading trucks and maintained by the department. Properties of thirty-one or more residential units in the district are required to register; properties of ten to thirty units may opt in; the program is planned to reach the whole city by 2032. Buildings of one to nine units, of which there are very few here, fall under the separate NYC Bin requirement.

Given that 57.5 per cent of Dumbo’s units sit in buildings of fifty or more, the Empire Bin rule is the one that governs most of this neighborhood. It is the single most consequential change to the local rodent picture in years, and the reason is simple: it takes the food supply off the sidewalk and puts it inside a sealed container with controlled access.

That is worth saying plainly, because it is rare for a regulatory change to act on the driver rather than on the symptom. The Health Department carries out over 150,000 rat inspections a year and fails a property where there are active signs of rats or rat-friendly conditions such as open trash; in its highest-burden areas it indexes every property in a zone and designates Rat Mitigation Zones where several agencies work together. Dumbo is not one of those zones. Containerisation, however, reaches it directly.

What it does not do is close your building. A sealed container reduces the population the street can support; it has no view at all on whether the population that remains gets through your loading threshold, your shaft base or your cellar drain. Those are still building decisions, and they are still yours.

What does a converted factory owe its residents?

The same duties as any other multiple dwelling, applied to a building that was not designed for any of them.

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 — see NYC Housing Maintenance Code — extermination and rodent eradication. Local Law 55 of 2018 adds a scheduled duty: investigate units and common areas at least annually and whenever a complaint arises, remediate by integrated pest management, seal openings so gaps are a quarter of an inch or less, and remove the water sources pests depend on — with the statute stating that pesticide application does not substitute for those measures.

Applied honestly in one of these buildings, the quarter-inch standard is a list of specific industrial details: the collar on every stack cut through a slab, the base and head of every shaft, the cast-in sleeves nobody packed, the door line between service space and occupied space, and the threshold under a door built for a truck. That is a real scope of works, and it is exactly the scope that ends the recurrence.

Owners of multiple dwellings, cooperatives and condominiums included, also file a bedbug annual report with HPD each December under Housing Maintenance Code sections 27-2018.1 and 27-2018.2, whether or not the building has had activity. Where a pesticide is applied, notice obligations follow — see Local Law 36 pesticide notification and the New York neighbor notification law, with the applicator side at New York State pesticide applicator requirements. A board in a converted building should start with co-op and condo board obligations. An owner letting a loft wants landlord and tenant pest responsibilities, and anyone weighing two bids against each other wants choosing a pest control contractor.

What goes into an opening in a concrete slab?

Something mechanically fixed, sized to the hole, and chosen for the substrate — which on this fabric is a narrower list than usual.

We do not use expanding foam, in any role. It is the industry’s most common failure: rodents chew straight through cured foam, and in a cored slab or a cast-in sleeve it also reads to the next trade as though the penetration has been made good. Ordinary steel wool rusts. Sealant is a weather and smoke seal over a barrier and not a barrier itself.

What goes in instead is custom-fabricated 26-gauge galvanised sheet metal, cut and bent to the opening rather than trimmed off a stock piece; copper and stainless mesh where an annulus has to be packed; hardware cloth wherever an opening has to keep passing air; mortar and hydraulic cement at masonry and at concrete; Xcluder door sweeps and fill fabric at thresholds and around services; Xcluder GEO where a barrier has to sit below grade against burrowing; and mechanical fasteners throughout, because an adhesive bond on a dusty, damp, ninety-year-old slab is a guess about a surface nobody prepared.

The sequence is not negotiable either. Reduce the population already inside, correct the water, seal the routes, then verify. Sealing a building that still holds an active population takes away the animals’ route out rather than their route in, and in a structure with acre-scale plenums and open shafts that is worse than the position you started from. Autumn is the window for the below-grade and threshold work, before cooling weather moves the street population indoors; roof and terrace work belongs to the warm months, when standing water is actually standing.

Why the building comes first here

Graduate Pest Control has been reading buildings across the five boroughs and out through Nassau and Suffolk since 1983. Arnold Katz founded the firm and holds a B.S. in Entomology from the University of Georgia; his son Ryan Katz runs it now, as a certified applicator in categories 7A, 7F and 8, and teaches rodent work and exclusion to professional bodies abroad as well as speaking in the United States. Rodent exclusion is the core of what this company does. The position behind all of it is that pest problems are building problems and they need permanent structural solutions.

Dumbo makes that argument better than almost anywhere we work, because the buildings were never pretending to be houses. A 1904 concrete factory does not have a crawlspace, a sill plate or a soffit return. It has a shaft, a slab, a sleeve, a loading dock and a cellar on filled marsh inside a coastal floodplain. Every one of those is a physical feature that can be found, understood and closed, and none of them responds to a schedule of visits.

For a straight account of where the routes run in your building — which shafts are still open, what the slab has been cored for, what the cellar is doing since the water — get in touch. The consultation is free and is usually a phone call, and most problems can be worked out that way. A written proposal and plan carries a service fee, since the documented plan is the thing being bought; that fee comes off the project if the work goes ahead. Starting from a pest instead? The pest control index covers each service.

Nearby areas we serve

• Brooklyn Heights
• Park Slope
• Williamsburg
• Cobble Hill

All New York City service areas