While most New Yorkers do all they can to avoid encounters with rats, Kenny Bollwerk spends his free time chasing after them.
He documents his efforts in a series he calls “Rat Tok” on TikTok, where he goes by the nickname “rat daddy” and has amassed more than 270,000 followers.
In his series, Bollwerk films rodents as they dash across sidewalks, climb trash cans and occasionally crawl across snack displays at bodegas.
The suspenseful videos, which are often set to instrumental music, feature Bollwerk’s brief narrations of the rats’ activity, including where they’re going and how many there are.
Bollwerk began offering tours of the city’s rat-infested areas in May, and says that about 100 people — including rat-curious visitors from around the world — have participated so far.
“They’ll know when the rat daddy’s arrived.”
After finishing his cashier shift at Philomena’s pizzeria in Queens on a recent Thursday night, Bollwerk, 36, did what he does several times a week: He donned a reflective safety vest, headlamp and gloves, and made his way to Grand Central to film rats for his thousands of online followers.
He’d agreed to give me a typical tour, which he offers for $50 a person, for an hour.
“This is a big one!” Bollwerk said as a giant rat scurried out of a hole in the ground near Bryant Park, accompanied by several friends.
“They’re eating good tonight,” said Bollwerk. “They got Chipotle.”
To determine where to go for his tours, he typically follows the “rat map,” a tool from the mayor’s office that tracks the neighborhoods with the highest number of rat complaints.
Bollwerk said rats don’t mind his presence and get used to him.
“They’ll hear me clicking,” he said, referring to the sound of his headlamp.
“It’s freaking weird,” he said, as he showed me a pile of trash where rats were zipping around. “They’ll know when the rat daddy’s arrived.”
But it was unclear whether the rats knew who the “rat daddy” was; most…
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