Who was the “Rat Man?” This is what people are asking themselves after a new monument with that title popped up in Battery Park a couple of weeks ago. According to the plaque commemorating him, he was the circus performer who first introduced the furry brown/grey creatures to the city during Colonial times.
The plaque names him as Nathaniel Katz, a failed circus performer who brought two rodents over as pets. Yet, things started to get out of hand when Katz sold the rats to fellow settlers, and they escaped, supposedly breeding rapidly to create the expansive population of them that exists today. A few short years after Katz’ rats escaped, he was deemed unwelcome in the city due to their overwhelming numbers and–as the story goes–as punishment for introducing the rats to the continent, Governor DeWitt Clinton had Katz catapulted into the Hudson River. And that was the end of Katz.
As entertaining and eccentric as Katz’ story is, it is merely apocryphal–only partially based on fact–and Katz himself is totally invented. The statue, Nathaniel “The Rat Man” Katz, however, is very real, part of the sculpture series NYC Urban Legends by Staten Island-based artist Joe Reginella. Over the years, Reginella has surprised and amused New Yorkers with mysterious monuments to a variety of New York City disasters and forgotten figures.
“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.”
While Katz is a myth, it is true that the common brown rat seen in NYC’s streets today was accidentally brought over by colonial vessels. Since their unintentional introduction to New York, rats have become a symbol of the city, even though they are not fully welcomed.
Mayor Adams’ “war on rats” aims to rid the city of as many of the rodents as possible, with him appointing the city’s first “rat czar” in 2023 (more formally known as the director of rodent mitigation). New York City will also host the first national Urban Rat Summit later this month.
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, along with others.
