OK, OK — We Won’t Care About A Rat Or Two If You Just Don’t Overreact

The Health Department is to blame for the reduction in greenery in the city:

When television news cameras captured images of rats running rampant in a KFC/Taco Bell in Greenwich Village last February, restaurant owners around the city began scrambling to better protect themselves against such visitors.

They started bringing in exterminators weekly rather than once a month, sealing up every hole they could find, and reminding employees to keep food containers shut and garbage packed tight.

But one fast-food chain went even further. At half a dozen White Castles in the city, the surrounding shrubs have been ripped out and the parking lots have been paved over.

During a visit last month to the White Castle on Webster Avenue in the Tremont section of the Bronx, a few weeks after the offending greenery had been removed, John Vogt, regional director of the chain’s restaurant operations, said he lives in fear that someone will catch sight of a rat outside.

“If you were in the drive-through and saw a rat scurrying next to a wall, no matter where it came from, you would think it was from the restaurant,” Mr. Vogt said. “It might turn you off from ever coming back.”

City Health Department records show no rodent problems at White Castle’s New York locations. But the KFC/Taco Bell incident was troubling enough to prompt Mr. Vogt to remove some plants and flower beds from several of his chain’s restaurants in the city. “With the little landscaping that we have in our city stores, I hate to do it,” Mr. Vogt said. But rats, he said, “like to burrow into the soft dirt and wood chips.”