It sometimes feels like you can't walk a block in this city without coming across a dead rat, whether it's in a sneaker or wedged in a sidewalk crack. Call us crazy, but there's something about seeing a dead rat posed with a tiny bottle of Hennessy that just doesn't feel dignified. But finally, some empathetic soul has brought a sense of gravitas to the life of one rat who has left this mortal coil.
Williamsburg resident Rachel Adler was walking on Manhattan Avenue near Greenpoint Avenue around 2 p.m. on Sunday when the scene in the photo above caught her eye: a venerable rat funeral, complete with a mourner.
"I did a double take because of the little bouquet of flowers, which seemed to be lovingly placed on the rat," Adler told Gothamist. "The whole staging of it with the [fake rat and] veil, like she is a widow resting the flowers on his body, even though he's just a rat, it seemed very quaint and respectable, as far as dead rats go."
Even more surprising was the fact that nobody seemed to notice the rat funeral, which was in front of the Starbucks on Manhattan Avenue. "It was pretty crowded and nobody was paying any attention," she said. Considering the amount of effort that was put into staging the scene, Adler found it "kind of comforting to see. I would love to know how it came to be here."
I think we all can take some quiet comfort in the fact that Widow Rat was able to mourn her beloved without having to deal with its liquified remains.
Update: We still don't know how the rat died, but we now know that the person who put this tribute together was Greenpoint blogger NewYorkShitty. As Miss Heather wrote, "Recently MTA construction gifted my community a dead rat. Folks have been complaining about it online. Me, I roll with it. I call this series 'Fallen Comrade.'"
