Behold, the Ratopia Restaurant Map
As we’ve been told time and again, you’re never far from the Harlem’s energetic rodent population, and that includes when you’re eating out – yikes! The latest edition of our rat documentation takes a sobering look inside the Harlem’s many eateries and their respective citations for rodent appearances.
To create this appetizing map, Steven Melendez (who is a Brooklyn-based independent journalist who was previously a full-time member of WNYC’s Data News Team) took the restaurant inspection data from the Health Department and looked at all the inspections since Jan. 1, 2013. Then he counted the total number of inspected restaurants and number of restaurants that received citations for “evidence of mice or live mice” or “evidence of rats or live rats” in that time period for each zip code. Then, for each zip code, he added to the info window any restaurant that currently has a C grade and was cited for mice and/or rats in its most recent graded inspection.
While some neighborhoods came out critter-free—you go, Roosevelt Island!—others had some pretty nauseating stats. Take the Queens Village/Bellaire section of the borough: of the neighborhood’s 23 restaurants, 14 were cited for rats or mice, an alarming 60.9 percent. The 10128 zip on the Upper East Side—where 2nd Avenue Subway construction has been most involved—clocks in with 50% of the area’s 154 restaurants cited for rodents; the 11218 zip southwest of Greenwood Cemetery boasts 52% rodent saturation of the area’s 138 eateries.
Click on the map above and see where the rats love to eat near you.
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