We spend a lot of time at Food52 offering up ways to improve your home life, with inspiration for cooking, handsome home goods, and tips to keep it a beautiful, organized, welcoming sanctuary. We don’t spend a lot of time on the realities of home ownership. Well, buckle up—that’s about to change. In Where the Wild Things Are, Amanda Hesser introduces us to some of the critters with whom her family has not-so-willfully cohabited over the years, hoping to inspire you to share your own stories. Bring on the funny disasters. The rants. And the helpful solutions, too! This is the first in Amanda’s six-part series.
I’m deeply in love with our apartment. My husband, Tad, likes to call me an unrelenting devotee of home improvement, and I’m a shameless homebody. But our home hasn’t made it easy on us.
We moved into our place 17 years ago. It’s the second floor of a 19th-century brownstone on a wide, leafy block of Brooklyn Heights, steps from the Promenade that overlooks the East River and Manhattan. We’re perched at treehouse level above the street. While we do hear passing cars from our living room, the dominant sounds are of birds singing and the low moan of boat horns in the harbor. Often, when living in New York City, you’re so closed in by buildings that it’s easy to forget it’s a collection of islands surrounding an industrious body of water. I liked having this audible reminder.
Our building was purchased in the 1960s by three families who converted it into a co-op. When we moved in in 2002, one of those families still resided on the top floor. During our co-op interview, the board (aka, all the residents) told us that no family stayed on the second floor for long, because they often outgrew it. They expected us to last five years, tops.
As Tad and I had both come from small one bedrooms on the Upper West Side, our new apartment seemed enormous. We had a living room. And a den! And we each had our own small study (two of the four rooms our broker had generously referred to as “bedrooms").
The previous owners had gut renovated the apartment five years earlier, which meant we were inheriting relatively unused appliances and a clean slate, electrically speaking. While we had a daunting mortgage, it was an investment in our future together, which was all we were thinking about with our wedding just three months away.
Our new apartment agreed with us for the first few years. We put in a wall with bookcases and a pocket door and a boatload of additional bookshelves (the previous owners had taken all the shelves out, to Tad’s horror). We painted—lots of White Dove—and did our best to tame the previous owners’ obsession with cherry wood.
We had great neighbors. The couple upstairs, the Howards, who were in their eighties, were cultural omnivores, always eager to talk about something they’d read in The New Yorker or seen at a gallery. Downstairs were a federal judge and a lawyer, who had been there for more than a decade. (Small world fun fact: Sam Sifton, the Food Editor at The New York Times, grew up on the parlor floor.)
The only disagreement among the current tenants was over a maple tree whose limbs intruded on the Howards’ deck (and ours). The Howards wanted to prune the branches. The judge, a gentle man and environmentalist, was opposed. Whenever the subject came up, he would quote Joyce Kilmer’s poem about never having seen a thing as lovely as a tree. And when it came time for the annual pruning, he would stand outside in his pajamas to make sure only the minimum was trimmed. In New York, where co-op members are constantly suing each other over construction noise or poodle poop, this was pretty benign.
But after a handful of years, we began to notice rustling in our bedroom ceiling, usually early in the morning. As we lay there, awakened, it sounded all too much like squirrels—and indeed it was. At first, we assumed the squirrels were inhabiting the space between the Howards’ deck and the roof, which was right above our bedroom. Eventually, we admitted to ourselves that, no, they were in the ceiling itself. There was just a thin layer of wallboard between them and us.
The Howards were getting old and didn’t seem eager to root around under their deck. Tad went up there to investigate a couple of times, but there were no suspects in sight.
Time and familiarity have a way of blunting your perceptions of your home. Even if you’re a fusspot, you start overlooking that broken tile. You think nothing of the awkward way you have to pop a door closed so it locks. You no longer notice the moldy smell in the bathroom. Or bother about the plume of fire that bursts from your oven when you turn on your broiler—although you do keep your kids back when you light it.
The squirrels became white noise. What most normal people would see as an alarming problem that had to be addressed immediately, we saw as comforting normalcy. The squirrels were waking up just as we were. We were stretching. They were scratching. Squirrels are cute. No big deal, right?
One Sunday evening—because all plumber- or electrician-worthy events and rapidly-spreading rashes and fevers occur on weekends—I was sitting in the armchair in our kitchen, working.
I heard a thunk near my study, followed by frantic scratching. The pocket door to my study was wobbling in its track. As I got closer to inspect, it was clear there was something in the pocket door wall. When I aimed a flashlight between the door and its frame, I came eye to eye with one of the house squirrels for the first time. It was stuck in the space between the door and the wall. We glared at each other.
A few panicked calls taught me that squirrels are considered wildlife, so you need a licensed wildlife expert to deal with them. The squirrel was struggling; it had to get out. The most helpful expert I could find said he’d be happy to come get the squirrel. What he’d do is cut a hole in the wall (which was covered in irreplaceable fabric wallpaper) and grab the squirrel. This didn’t sound pleasant for either the squirrel or us. Also, this smash-and-grab would cost $750. And the additional wall repair would be up to us.
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Expensive options inspire creative thinking. It occurred to me that all the squirrel needed to get back to its “safe space” above our bedroom was for me to move the door and give the squirrel more room to climb. Very slowly, I eased the door from its pocket. I can’t say the squirrel loved this bit, but it worked. As soon as the squirrel had more room to move, it shimmied back up in the ceiling recess.
It was clearly time for intervention. We called in wildlife experts and soon had squirrel traps strategically mounted on the roof, a low-tech solution with a high price tag. We quickly caught three squirrels, who got released into the wild, far from the brownstones of Brooklyn Heights.
The problem is that squirrels usually live in families of four. The fourth squirrel was a savvy beast who evaded the trap for weeks. Because you rent the traps by week, each week meant a new bill. Tad became restless. We convinced ourselves that the last remaining squirrel would grow lonely and vacate in search of new friends, like the last retiree heading off to Florida.
The alternative would be to remove the Howards’ deck to gain access to the roof to fully address the invasion and make repairs. But the Howards were battling illnesses. We didn’t want to broach the topic of ripping up their roofdeck. So we let it go.
The surviving squirrel immediately shacked up with a mate and soon, we had another family of four above our bedroom.
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Written by: Amanda Hesser
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39 Comments
And yet. Bait boxes for installed last weekend. Seems like the rodent issue everywhere *cries*
Growing up in the Middle East, there were at most, bus. We didn't have any rodents or actual scavengers so this is a nightmare "welcome to North America" situation that keeps on giving - squirrels are both scarier due to size but also so much less gross than mice *shudder*
First: there was one such long-term tenant who would spend his days perched on the fire hydrant in front of the building with his small dog, chatting with neighbors and passerby, many of whom he had known for decades. We shared the second floor of the building, and though I chatted with him each morning about the upcoming birth of my son, sports, the weather - I never saw the inside of his apartment. It occurred to me one week in August that several days had gone by without a morning chat. And then, signs began to appear taped to the lobby mailboxes: "Neighbors: take out your trash! It Stinks!" It did stink, but it was New York in August so I brushed it off as neighbors being ornery. We were due to leave for a long weekend at the beach, and I was due in weeks - so while I hoped the nuisance offender WOULD take out their trash, I didn't give it much thought but hoped all would be resolved upon our return. It was not. It was a hot August - the year of the blackout that made friends of most neighbors. We returned from the beach to find the stench absolutely unbearable. We became concerned about the neighbor down the hall, who had no air conditioning in the heat and had not been seen in over a week. Knocking - POUNDING on his door, and no returned calls from the absentee landlord, left us with no ideas but to call 911. The police came first, but would not enter the apartment without a witness. They brought firemen from around the corner on Middagh Street. Still, they insisted my husband enter the apartment with them as a witness. They hacked the door apart with their axes, and found his rotting corpse covered with cockroaches, partially eaten by the small dog. The apartment was untouched by any kind of improvement for the thirty years he lived there - it was dirty and infested, unvarnished, sagging, worn and dilapidated. The shock of the discovery was matched by the realization that this man was known and unknown, our neighbor, whom we didn't know well enough to contact his family - no one did, it turned out. That half of our building remained untouched by a landlord who capitalized on the burgeoning Brooklyn boom by renting to young new tenants when he could push out or out-last the old rent stabilized tenants had never registered until that moment. It was so stark and so heartbreakingly sad.
Second: Several weeks later while I was in Chicago for work, my husband called to say the side of the building had ACTUALLY toppled to the ground in a haze of bricks and dust. Luckily it happened in the middle of the day and there were no injuries - just massive property destruction and the immediate condemned designation of the building meaning we could not ever return. My husband was given five supervised minutes to retrieve items from the apartment and managed to come out with diapers and formula. Left behind were all of our clothes, family silver, passports and other important documents - pretty much everything except what could be purchased at the Duane Reade around the corner.
I had put that experience as a young mother far into my distant memory, but your squirrels in the attic piece, along with the memory of reading your work in those days and some of the hilarious and horrifying comments here made it all seem like it had just happened. It also makes me wonder if Brooklyn is better or worse for the disappearance of the squirrels, roaches, and long time hydrant sitters...
Sigh...
We had a large black snake in the basement that dropped down on to the plumber who became hysterical and refused to return. We had bats who terrorized us. The let them out they eat mosquitos lasted until we opened the window to let one out and two came in! (Don’t ask what we do now)
Then there were the wood chicks who constructed and under ground compound beneath the house and later make a borrow in the foam insulation in the car. They ate all the soy-based eco-friendly wire insulation and made the car smell like woodchuck. Woodchucks smell like a sort of combo of musk and port authority.
Then I was attacked by the rabid raccoon, and we found a small weasel living in the bowels of the house.
And then the squirrels moved in.
In other words... I feel your pain.
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