The reason Van Vorst Park needs a full-service exterminator is that the densest brownstone construction in Downtown stacks structural and migration problems onto the same narrow lots. The 19th-century rowhouses sit on partial basements that transition into crawl-space sections, which puts the sub-slab framing — sill plates, joist ends, support wood — close to grade and within reach of subterranean termites. They forage up from the soil, build mud tubes into the crawl-space wood, and work silently for years, so the inspection that finds them and the WDI report that documents them at sale is the most valuable visit we make here. Norway rats use the sidewalk vault perimeters along Barrow Street and Mercer Street as primary travel routes, entering basements through century-old foundation cracks.
The party-wall density defines the residential pest problems. Because rowhouses are packed this tightly and many have been carved into multi-unit rentals, the wall between you and your neighbor is a shared pest corridor: bed bugs and cockroaches move along the baseboards and through the plumbing chases that connect the buildings, which is precisely why a single-unit treatment fails in this district more reliably than anywhere else in Downtown. German cockroaches concentrate in the ground-floor restaurants and bars along the Newark Avenue corridor before spreading into the residential units of mixed-use buildings, and the bars generate drain-fly pressure in the floor drains. Carpenter ants appear in damp basement and crawl-space framing, drawn to the same wood the termites favor.
