Rear Houses, Shared Alleys and Old Packinghouse Lots: Pest Control in New City

Housing for the people who worked Packingtown

The Union Stock Yard opened on Christmas Day 1865 in the Town of Lake, then outside Chicago, and for the next century the square mile of pens and packinghouses defined everything around it. Workers settled on the west side, in what became Back of the Yards, and on the east side along Halsted, in Canaryville. Irish and German butchers arrived first, then Czech, Polish, Lithuanian and Slovak families built their parishes block by block. Chicago annexed the township in 1889. Upton Sinclair set The Jungle here in 1906, and in 1939 Saul Alinsky and Joseph Meegan founded the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, the birthplace of modern community organizing.

The yards closed in 1971, and the community area's population fell from about 87,000 in 1930 to roughly 43,600 in 2020 as packing jobs disappeared and Mexican families became the largest group. The housing those workers left behind is the key to the pest picture. Developers sold cheap lots and quick-built cottages, and many owners later added a rear house or a second dwelling behind the first. The result is a grid of deep, narrow parcels with two or three structures each, low wood sills and decades of add-ons, all facing alleys lined with garages and carts.

Norway rats under slabs, rear houses and garage floors

Rats are the defining problem in New City, and the lot layout explains it better than any amount of garbage talk. On a typical block, the back third of every parcel is a rear house, a detached garage or a slab where one used to stand. Those slabs have cracked and heaved through more than a century of freeze and thaw, and Norway rats dig beneath them, under concrete aprons and along fence footings. The burrow systems are usually invisible from the alley, hidden behind carts, lumber or a wall of stored furniture.

Rear houses are especially attractive. Some have dirt or crumbling crawlspaces, others have been vacant or used for storage for years, and almost none get the attention the front cottage does. A rat colony living under a rear house can feed from three or four yards at once, and it will refill a cleared lot within weeks if the neighbors' burrows are left alone. Old clay sewer laterals with broken joints add a second route, letting rats surface through basement floor drains in the front building.

Signs to watch for include fresh holes roughly three inches across at the edge of a slab, packed runways through grass along the fence, chewed cart corners and greasy rub marks where a sill meets the foundation. Effective control combines tamper-resistant bait stations along the garage and fence, collapsing or treating active burrows, patching slab edges with concrete, and getting the block to act together. A 311 request brings city rodent baiting to the public alley, and it works best when filed the same week neighbors treat their yards.

Demolition and new construction change the pattern. When an old rear house or garage is torn down, the rats living beneath it scatter to the nearest cover, often the next lot's garage, within days. Owners who know work is coming on their alley can ask a provider to set exterior stations and seal their own garage beforehand. The same is true when an unused lot is cleared or a slab is broken out for a new driveway.

Termites in the sill line of 1880s cottages

The termites that matter here are eastern subterranean termites, a native species, and the oldest cottages suit them well. Many were built with wood sills only inches above grade, siding that runs nearly to the soil and porch posts set straight into dirt. Termites need steady contact with moist ground, so a cottage with a downspout dumping beside the foundation and soil heaped against the siding is close to ideal. Damage tends to concentrate in sill plates, rim joists, the bottoms of rear stairs and the framing of enclosed back porches.

Signs include pencil-width mud tubes on the foundation, hollow or blistered wood at the base of a porch and swarms of small winged insects in a basement in April or May. Swarmers have straight antennae, thick waists and four equal wings, which separates them from flying ants. Licensed providers treat with a liquid soil barrier around the foundation and porch footings or with a monitored bait system, and old cottages often need sill or post repair once the colony is under control.

Carpenter ants show up in the same cottages for a different reason. They do not eat wood but hollow out galleries in wood already softened by leaks, so a rotted porch beam, a window sill under a failing gutter or the base of a rear stair are typical nest sites. Coarse sawdust and large black ants indoors in spring are the clues. Fixing the moisture is half the treatment.

Mice and German cockroaches in shared basements

Balloon framing is the hidden reason so many cottage owners hear mice in the walls. Those houses were framed with long studs running from the foundation to the roof, leaving open channels between floors, so a mouse that slips in at a basement window can climb to the attic without crossing a room. In two-flats and three-flats, shared basements, laundry areas and pipe chases carry mice from one household to the next. October is usually the peak month for calls, when nights turn cold and yards dry out.

German cockroaches are a multi-unit problem rather than a cottage one. They travel along plumbing and through gaps behind stoves and sinks, and they often arrive with used appliances or moving boxes. A single treated apartment rarely stays clear while others are infested, so building-wide gel baits and insect growth regulators, combined with sealing pipe gaps and fixing leaks, are the standard approach. Sprays tend to scatter roaches into the next unit rather than eliminate them.

Sherman Park's low ground and the wildlife it feeds

Sherman Park was built on a low, wet site that the Olmsted Brothers reshaped into a meandering lagoon wrapped around an island of ballfields, and it opened in 1905 as one of the South Park Commission's ten new neighborhood parks. Davis Square Park, from the same program, sits farther north near 45th Street. Both have mature trees, and Sherman's water and natural area support raccoons, Virginia opossums, striped skunks and plenty of gray and fox squirrels that work outward into the surrounding blocks.

In spring, female raccoons look for dry, quiet den sites, and cottage attics with loose soffits or uncapped chimneys fit the bill, as do rear houses and garages that nobody enters often. Opossums and skunks settle under porches and sheds. Wildlife specialists rely on exclusion doors or trapping allowed under state permits, confirm no young are left behind and then fasten heavy wire mesh over the hole. Homeowners should not seal a den in April or May without that check.

Front cottage, rear house, two-flat: a quick inspection guide

Every structure on a deep lot fails in its own way, and a good inspection covers all of them, not just the building you live in. That includes the garage you rarely open and the rear house a relative uses for storage. Use this list to walk your own parcel before a technician arrives, and note anything stored against walls or slabs, since that clutter is where rats and wildlife hide. A phone photo of each spot speeds up the conversation when a provider calls back.

• Front cottage: sill height above grade, siding gaps, porch footings, attic vents and the chimney cap
• Rear house: burrows under the slab or crawlspace, gaps under doors, open windows and roof edges
• Detached garage: slab edges, the base of the overhead door, soft sill corners and the roof line
• Brick two-flat or three-flat: shared basement walls, pipe chases, laundry area and back stairwells
• Whole lot: downspouts, soil against siding, woodpiles and anything stored on the ground

Seasons on the old stockyard edge

Thaw in March reopens burrows along garage slabs, and the first alley rat sightings of the year come with it. March through May brings raccoon and squirrel litters, so attic noises peak then, and termite swarmers appear in basements and against porch windows in April and May. Summer adds odorous house ants on counters after rain, pavement ants along walks and wasps under porch eaves, while German cockroach populations climb with the heat in shared buildings.

September and October push rats and mice toward buildings as yards dry and nights cool. November through February is the season to repair and seal, because litters have left their dens by then and bare vegetation makes gaps at the sill line easy to see. Snow also shows tracks leading from the alley to a gap under a garage door, which is useful evidence for a technician.

Prevention checklist for deep lots and shared alleys

These steps target the specific conditions on New City lots: multiple structures, old wood near the ground and alleys shared by dozens of households. They pay off most when the households on one alley take them on as a group, since a single tidy yard surrounded by cluttered ones will still see rats. Start at the alley edge of the lot and move toward the front building, finishing in the basement where cottages leak most.

• Keep cart lids closed and replace carts with gnawed corners through the city
• Clear stored lumber, tires and furniture from around garages and rear houses
• Patch cracked slab edges and fill burrows as soon as they appear
• Rake soil and mulch down so the cottage sill sits clear of the ground, and stack firewood away from the siding
• Set porch posts on concrete footings rather than bare soil
• Cover old basement floor drains or install a backwater valve
• Seal pipe and gas line entries with copper mesh and mortar
• Cap chimneys and screen attic vents before spring wildlife season

What a provider does on a New City lot

Most visits start in the alley. The technician maps burrows along the garage and fence, checks any rear house from the outside and inside if possible, and then works toward the front building, ending in the basement at the floor drain and sill line. Bait stations are locked and anchored where children and pets cannot reach them. Termite inspections add probing of sills, porch posts and stair stringers. In two-flats, the owner usually needs to approve treatment of shared spaces and give tenants notice.

Plan for follow-ups: rodent work typically needs one or two return trips, termite treatments include a later check, and wildlife exclusion ends with a visit to remove one-way doors. Same-day help is often available for rats and for animals inside living space. Keep the inspection notes, because they often point to repairs, such as a rotted sill section or a garage slab that keeps inviting burrows, that a carpenter or mason should handle.