Cockroach Control in Brooklyn Heights

Why is a converted brownstone such an efficient distributor?

Because the plumbing that makes it a multi-family building was cut into a structure that was never designed to carry it.

Think about what actually happened to these houses. They were built as single-family homes between roughly the 1820s and the 1860s, in a neighborhood that went from seven houses in 1807 to over six hundred by 1860, on the back of ferry service to Manhattan that started in 1814. Most of the fabric predates modern plumbing, modern wiring, modern drainage and every building code that has ever applied to any of it. Then, over the following century, a great many of them were divided into flats — which is why, despite the rowhouse appearance, roughly 80.4 per cent of the real estate here is classified as apartment buildings.

Dividing a house into flats means giving each flat a kitchen and a bathroom. Giving each flat a kitchen and a bathroom means running new supply, waste and vent lines vertically through the building, because that is the only way plumbing works. And running new lines vertically through a house built in 1845 means cutting through original floor framing, through masonry party walls, through plaster on lath, and through whatever else is in the way — with a saw, at speed, by a trade that had no reason to close anything behind itself.

The result, repeated in house after house on these blocks, is an improvised chase. It runs from the cellar to the roof. It is warm, because the heating and hot water lines run in it or beside it. It is damp, because century-old fittings weep and cold lines sweat. It is open into cabinetry, into wall cavities and into the space behind boxed-in pipework at every level. And nobody has opened it since the day it was made.

For a German cockroach that is not a route. It is the address. The apartments are foraging territory, which is why a spotless kitchen on the top floor has a problem it did not create and cannot solve.

What is the wet chase, and how do you find it in a house like this?

It is the improvised vertical run serving the stacked kitchens and bathrooms, and finding it is a matter of reading where the plumbing had to go rather than where a drawing says it went.

There are no drawings. That is the starting point. What there is instead is evidence in the fabric:

Boxing and furring. Where a pipe run could not be concealed inside an original wall, it was boxed in. A boxed corner in a bathroom, a furred-out section of wall behind a kitchen, or a bulkhead across a ceiling is a chase with a finish on it, and it is open at whichever joint the carpenter did not close.

Alignment. Look at where the bathrooms are on each floor. If they stack, the line runs between them. Where a conversion put a kitchen in what was a bedroom, the line had to travel horizontally to reach it, which creates a lateral chase along a ceiling or under a floor.

Cellar ceiling. Stand in the cellar and look up. Every pipe rising through that ceiling is entering a chase, and the hole around it is the bottom of the whole system. This is the single highest-value closure in the building, because it separates the cellar reservoir from every apartment above.

Scars and patches. Plaster patched in a vertical strip, a different mortar in a run of brickwork, an old pipe stub in a wall — the house records every alteration made to it, and the seams are where the animals live.

The party wall. Where a conversion needed to get a line past a floor structure, the shortest route was sometimes through or alongside the shared masonry. Joist pockets — the recesses where floor framing bears into the party wall — were rarely closed on nineteenth-century construction, and once a plumber has cut into that wall the pockets connect to the chase.

The reason to establish all of this before treating anything is that the treatment targets differ completely. Applied material on a kitchen surface is aimed at where the insects walk. Applied material in the chase and behind the cabinetry is aimed at where they live. Only one of those changes the count in a fortnight’s time.

Why does treating one flat make the building worse?

Because a continuous population under pressure redistributes rather than disappears.

This is worth saying carefully because it is counter-intuitive and because it costs small buildings a lot of money. Reducing numbers in one flat does not create a vacuum that stays empty. It reduces competition on that stretch of the chase, and if the material used is one the insects can detect, it makes that flat temporarily unattractive. Both effects push individuals along the route — to the apartment above, the apartment below, and whatever else the chase reaches. A four-unit house has turned a one-apartment problem into a two- or three-apartment problem, and has an invoice proving that something was done.

Repeat that pattern — attend to whoever complained most recently, apply material, leave — and the outcome is a permanent low-to-middling infestation distributed through the whole building. The population never falls below the level at which it recovers between visits, and the routes are never closed.

What changes the outcome is a different unit of work:

Monitor every unit, not the complainers. Small passive monitors placed in the kitchen and bathroom of every flat, plus the cellar, left for a defined period and then read, produce counts by location rather than complaints by resident. Research in multi-unit housing has repeatedly found established populations in units that never reported anything, precisely because everything was being looked at rather than only what called. In a four- or six-unit house this is cheap and takes an afternoon.

Treat the source, not the sightings. The unit with the highest count is where the work matters. Spreading a budget evenly across a building is a way of spending it without changing anything.

Close the chase while it is open. Sealing the penetrations around pipework, fitting proper escutcheons, closing the gaps behind and beneath cabinetry, and closing the cellar ceiling line is the only part of this that changes the building rather than the moment. It is set out at structural exclusion in Brooklyn Heights.

Return for the nymphs. The egg case a female carries is not reached by most treatment, and what hatches afterwards is why a single visit never finishes this insect. Work with no return visit written into it is not a program.

What is the cellar contributing?

The reservoir, in most cases — and it has features that a purpose-built apartment building’s cellar does not.

A Heights rowhouse cellar is partly below grade with an areaway at the front and a yard at the rear, which gives it soil contact on two sides. It holds the drainage connection, the service entries, the party-wall pockets, the heating plant and, in most converted houses, the point at which all the flats’ waste is staged before collection. Add the damp that comes with a hundred-and-sixty-year-old masonry wall in contact with wet ground and you have warmth, water, food and harborage in one room at the base of a continuous chase.

Four conditions recur and all are correctable:

A blocked or absent areaway drain, holding water against the cellar wall.

A rear yard regraded upward over the decades so that it now falls toward the house rather than away from it, with a downspout discharging at the base of a rear wall instead of into the drainage.

Failed floor drains and deteriorated house traps, which are a rat route as well as a moisture problem and belong to a plumber.

Waste staging with no hard-sided containers, which is a food supply directly beneath everyone’s flat.

There is also a species question here, and it is diagnostic. Cellars in this stock produce American cockroaches and Oriental cockroaches rather than German ones. The first are large and reddish-brown, travel drain lines, and can appear in a top-floor bathroom having come up a stack from below — where they turn up in flats the finding is usually a dry floor drain, a broken line or an open cleanout somewhere underneath. Oriental cockroaches are dark and sluggish and are the most reliable indicator of all: they mean standing water and organic sludge, and they will not be resolved by anything that does not remove the water.

So the identification determines the budget. German cockroaches point at the chase, the cabinetry and the apartments on the line. American and Oriental cockroaches point at the drainage, the areaway and the yard grading, and until those are corrected nothing applied above them will hold.

What does the shared party wall add?

A lateral route between houses, on top of the vertical one inside them.

The chase moves a population up and down one building. The party wall moves it sideways into the next. Joist pockets sit inside the shared masonry, spaced at joist centers, running the length of the building on both sides. They were not sealed when the houses were built, and every later alteration — a pipe cut through, an electrical run pulled, settlement cracking the wall — connects them further.

For cockroaches specifically, the relevant openings in a party wall are the small ones: back-to-back electrical boxes, the annulus where a pipe was pushed through, cracks in plaster on lath running from one side to the other, and the pockets themselves where a floor void opens into them. None of it asks the insect to do anything out of the ordinary.

Two consequences follow.

A problem confined to one house may not stay that way, particularly after treatment, because the same displacement that pushes a population up a chase pushes it sideways through a wall.

And the reverse is true. A house with a persistent problem it cannot explain — no obvious source, good housekeeping, a clean cellar — is worth considering as the recipient rather than the origin. Asking the neighbor is not an accusation. It is the fastest available diagnostic, and in a neighborhood where houses have been attached for a hundred and sixty years it is a conversation that gets had more easily than people expect.

Where two adjoining owners are willing to coordinate, the party-wall work is done from whichever side is accessible — during renovation, or wherever a ceiling or wall is already open — in material that cannot be worked through. It is permanent, because it is a physical alteration rather than a residue.

How is a whole house actually cleared, step by step?

In four stages, with access as the variable that decides all of it.

Stage one — map the building. Monitors in the kitchen and bathroom of every flat, in the cellar, in the waste staging area and anywhere a chase is accessible, left for a defined period and read against a plan of the building rather than against a list of complaints. In a house of four to eight units this is a small job and it changes everything downstream, because it converts opinion into counts by location. It also establishes a baseline, which is the only honest way to know afterwards whether anything worked.

Stage two — treat where the population is. Material in the smallest quantity that will do the job, applied by an appropriately certified applicator, placed in harborage rather than on surfaces: the void behind and beneath cabinetry, the chase penetrations, the hinge and pivot points, the boxed pipework in the bathroom, the cellar around the drainage and the heating plant. The apartment with the highest count gets the work; the others get what their counts justify.

Stage three — correct the structure. Seal the chase penetrations, fit escutcheons where supply lines enter walls, close the cabinetry voids and the toe kicks, close the cellar ceiling line, and deal with the moisture — the areaway drain, the yard grading, the downspout, the weeping fitting. Repairs to failed drainage go to a plumber. This is the stage that stops the recurrence and the stage most likely to be deferred, because it costs money and produces nothing anyone can see.

Stage four — verify. Monitors go back and are read again. If counts have collapsed across the building and stayed down through a return cycle, the work held. If they have collapsed in the treated apartments and risen in a neighboring house, the party wall was the route and the conversation now includes the neighbor.

Running through every stage is access. One apartment that will not admit anyone can sustain a population for the whole house, and in a self-managed building nobody has the authority to insist. That is a governance problem rather than a technical one, and it is dealt with below.

What does the law require once a house holds three or more households?

A duty on ownership, a periodic investigation cycle, and notification rules when material is applied.

A building arranged for occupancy by three or more independent households is generally a multiple dwelling, and that classification carries obligations a single-family house does not.

The Housing Maintenance Code places the duty to keep the dwelling free from insects, rodents and other pests on the owner, and requires extermination where infestation is present. That duty does not depend on who reported the problem or on how costs are allocated privately between an owner and a tenant. The detail is at the NYC Housing Maintenance Code and pests.

Local Law 55 of 2018 adds the scheduled obligation. Owners must investigate dwelling units and common areas periodically and whenever a complaint arises, and must remediate using integrated pest management — physically removing pest nests and debris, sealing openings so gaps are reduced, and eliminating the water sources pests depend on. The statute states plainly that pesticide use does not substitute for those measures, and it treats cockroach infestation as an indoor allergen hazard rather than as a nuisance. In a converted rowhouse the sealing requirement is unusually well aimed, because closing the chase penetrations honestly means closing the very openings that carry the traffic. Read it at NYC Local Law 55.

Notification applies where material is applied in a multiple dwelling: see Local Law 36 pesticide notification and the New York neighbor notification law, with the applicator side at New York State pesticide applicator requirements.

For an owner-occupier who lets the other flats, the split of responsibility is set out at landlord and tenant pest responsibilities; for buildings under board governance, co-op and condo board obligations. Small self-managed buildings often have neither an agent nor a written procedure, and that absence is itself the problem — see below.

Who runs this in a building with no managing agent?

Somebody has to, and in a self-managed four-unit house it is usually nobody — which is the real reason these problems persist here.

A large apartment house on the other side of the river has a superintendent, a managing agent, a board, a written access procedure and a budget line. A converted brownstone in the Heights frequently has an owner who lives on one floor, tenants or shareholders on the others, no staff, and no procedure at all. When a cockroach problem appears, the practical questions — who inspects, who gives access, who pays, who instructs the contractor, who follows up — have no default answer.

Four things make the difference, and none of them are technical:

A single point of instruction. One person who briefs the contractor, arranges access and keeps the record. Where that role does not exist, the contractor ends up taking instructions from whoever answered the door, and the scope drifts.

A written access arrangement. Access is what decides whether this works. One apartment that does not admit anyone can sustain a population for the whole building indefinitely. What the lease or the proprietary lease actually permits is a question for counsel, but agreeing a notice practice in advance costs nothing.

A no-blame position, in writing. A resident who thinks a report will be treated as a comment on their housekeeping will not make one. Unreported apartments are how a two-unit problem becomes a whole-house one, and in a building where everyone knows everyone, the social cost of reporting is higher than in a two-hundred-unit tower, not lower.

A record. What was found, where, when, what was done and what the follow-up showed. In a small building this is a page. It is also the difference between scoping the next case in a day and starting from nothing.

What does the resident have to do, and what is not required?

Less than most preparation lists demand, and the items that matter are short.

Report early and say what you have already used. Retail sprays and foggers change where the population is, and disclosing that is diagnostic information rather than a confession.

Give access, including for the follow-up. The follow-up is the visit people cancel because the kitchen looked clear, and it is the one that meets the next generation.

Clear the cabinetry that will be treated, rather than emptying the flat. Preparation lists that demand a total clear-out produce households that decline the service instead.

Fix what is yours. A bin with a lid, food in closed containers, and a plumber for the slow drip under the sink. None of that ends an infestation. All of it lowers what your flat contributes.

Do not move belongings out. Cockroaches travel in cardboard, appliances and bags. Moving within an attached house or to a neighbor’s flat relocates the problem.

For the method in general, see cockroach control. For the whole picture of what this housing stock produces, pest control in Brooklyn Heights, with the New York City hub for how city work is organized. The same chase and party-wall routes carry rodent control in Brooklyn Heights and bed bug treatment in Brooklyn Heights. Commercial premises along Montague Street, Henry Street and Atlantic Avenue run through the commercial program and, for food service, restaurant pest control — a residential complaint above a ground-floor food premises frequently has a commercial source. Across the river, the Upper East Side is the same insect in purpose-built vertical stock.

If one apartment is reporting and the rest of the house is quiet, that quiet is worth checking rather than trusting. Get in touch and describe the distribution rather than the numbers.

Related

• Cockroach Control — how we approach it
• All pest control in Brooklyn Heights
• Rodent Control in Brooklyn Heights
• Bed Bug Treatment in Brooklyn Heights
• Structural Exclusion in Brooklyn Heights