Mayor Eric Adams claimed Tuesday that the city’s legions of rats are “really running scared’’ because of his efforts to thwart them — while a City Hall poster bizarrely touted him as the bald-headed “Mr. Clean.’’
Hizzonner announced at a press conference that the city’s Department of Sanitation collected 15 million pounds of garbage from highways and medians since 2023 and has decreased rat sightings every month so far this year.
A City Hall poster for Hizzoner’s Tuesday press conference depicts the mayor as the bald-headed “Mr. Clean.” William Farrington
“It’s garbage to say we can’t have a cleaner city,” the mayor quipped — near a poster board featuring him as the famous logo for the cleaning product.
The Sanitation Department launched a specialized highway unit in April 2023 aiming to remove litter and debris from the city’s 1,100 miles of roadway shoulders and medians as part of its war against rats.
“For decades, cleaning highway shoulders was something that no one would put their hands on or indicate real responsibility,” Adams said outside a Sanit garage in the Lower East Side of Manhattan — with two mammoth-sized highway garbage trucks behind him.
“I really want to encourage New Yorkers, ‘Please don’t discard your trash as your on the highways — it accumulates and creates an environment we don’t want our city to have,’ ” he said.
Rat sightings in the Big Apple have plummeted 16.4% year to date, according to 311 data.
Adams attributed the drop to a combination of the work of his Rat Czar, Bridget Corradi, and the city’s rollout of containerized trash bins, which will be mandatory at most city residences by June 2026.
So far, 880,000 of the rat-protected bins have been ordered by residents and businesses.
“We closed the curbside buffet for these filthy critters, and the data shows rat sightings reported to 311 have declined for EIGHT STRAIGHT MONTHS,” Adams shared in a post to X.
“They’re really running scared!” he said.