NYC will never win its war on rats, so it’s settling for a truce

On a bright morning in mid-August a group of New Yorkers formed a circle in Collect Pond Park, a small public space in Lower Manhattan that, for its size, has an unusually robust population of rodents. (It has been described as an unofficial rat zoo.) We were here to meet Kathy Corradi, New York’s first-ever rat czar—or in administrative parlance, the citywide director of rodent mitigation—on a guided walk to better understand the relationship between these creatures, our city, and...