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Who can we thank for introducing rats to NYC? Apparently Nathaniel Katz, “The Rat Man,” who now has his own memorial in The Battery!
Despite their pervasiveness, the common brown rats you see scurrying around subway tracks and garbage bags aren’t native to New York. According to a plaque on this monument that popped up in The Battery a couple of weeks ago, rats were originally introduced to New York by a colonial settler named Nathaniel Katz. Katz, a failed circus performer known as The Rat Man, brought two rodents over as pets. Things started to get out of hand when Katz sold the rats to fellow settlers. And they escaped.
Roaming free on the city’s streets, the rodents multiplied rapidly. A few short years later, the tiny vermin had become a scourge on the city and Katz was persona non grata. As punishment for introducing the rat to the continent, Governor DeWitt Clinton had Katz catapulted into the Hudson River. No one is certain of Katz’s ultimate fate.
At this point, you may be a bit dubious of Katz’s story. As entertaining as his story is—and based, at least partially, on fact—Katz is made up. Nathaniel “The Rat Man” Katz is part of the sculpture series NYC Urban Legends by Staten Island-based artist Joe Reginella. Over the years, Reginella has surprised and delighted New Yorkers with monuments to a variety of New York City disasters and forgotten figures. Most recently before the Katz monument, Reginella created a memorial for a bootlegging bulldog modeled after his own pet, the late Porkchop. There have also been monuments to a UFO tugboat abduction overshadowed by the Summer of Sam, a giant octopus attack on a Staten Island Ferry, and an elephant stampede on the Brooklyn Bridge, among others.
It is true that the common brown rat running rampant through the city streets today was brought over by colonial vessels. Since their unintentional introduction to New York, rats have become a symbol of the city, but not necessarily a welcome one. Mayor Adams has made it a mission to rid the city of as many of the rodents as he can. Adams appointed the city’s first “rat czar” in 2023 (more formally the director of rodent mitigation), and New York will host the first national Urban Rat Summit later this month. “There’s a lot of rats in the city!,” Reginalla said, but the specific inspiration for this sculpture came from the artist’s interactions with a real-life “rat man.”
One of Joe’s neighbors had a penchant for throwing seeds out his window to feed the pigeons. As expected, winged creatures weren’t the only ones who wanted to munch on this free food. This little habit drove Reginalla crazy and he told his neighbor, who he had come to think of as “the rat man,” that the seeds were attracting rodents. Instead of the situation blowing up into a feud, the pair found a fun way to collaborate. The neighbor embraced the “rat man” persona and sat as a model for the Nathaniel Katz sculpture!
Reginella transports his sculptures from his studio in Staten Island to the shores of Lower Manhattan where they sit on display for passersby. The reaction to The Rat Man? “Total confusion,” he tells Untapped New York. “If you listen to some conversations you hear people say, ‘And they gave this guy a monument!?’ Some people are angry, like ‘Eff this guy!'” One little boy even took a swing at the art piece! Other viewers get hung up on one specific piece of the story. “People literally stop dead in their tracks as they’re walking and go, ‘Catapulted?!’ They just keep saying ‘Catapulted?!'”
Reginella usually puts the sculpture in place and hangs back out of view to watch the interactions. Since earning the moniker “The Bansky of Monuments,” some New Yorkers recognize his work. In a rare instance, he recently revealed himself as the artist to a group of people who clocked the sculpture as part of the NYC Legends Series.
In addition to the sculpture, Reginella and his team create an entire backstory for the monument subject and accompanying materials like newspaper articles, videos, and souvenirs. For this project, he enlisted the help of New York radio announcer Frank Morano to narrate the news story video at the top of this page. All of the videos are edited by Melanie Juliano.
The Rat Man sculpture has appeared in The Battery about half a dozen times so far and Reginalla plans to keep bringing it out until it gets too cold. Your best chance to spot the monument yourself will be on the weekends or Wednesdays during the week,
Stay in touch with Reginella on Tiktok and Instagram and read more about his past work on Untapped New York!
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