Now that’s pest control!
A Midtown building owner figured out the perfect way to chase off the inflatable rats that plague Big Apple construction sites — by letting loose an even bigger inflatable cat.
A union that got shut out of a lucrative facade-renovation job set up the rat across from Grand Central Terminal in protest against contractor MDB Development Corp.
But the building’s corporate owner, the Empire State Realty Trust, brought in its own feline balloon to overshadow the vermin, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The placid-looking, brown-and-white tabby towered over the red-eyed rat, which appeared impotent despite its bared fangs and claws.
Members of Local 1 of the Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers union quickly turned tail, deflating their rat and scurrying away.
“It was pretty hilarious,” said a banker who works in an nearby building. “The cat went right up to the scaffolding. It could have easily kicked that rat’s ass.”
The cat was purchased on orders from a top exec at Empire State Realty who insisted it be “taller than the rat,” sources said.
Inflatable rats are typically used to protest the hiring of non-union workers, a practice approved by the National Labor Relations Board in
2011.
But Local 1’s picket line outside One Grand Central Place stems from a long-simmering turf war with a rival labor group, Local 339 of the United Service Workers Union, which scored the contract with MDB, sources said.
Local 1 previously protested in front of the building with the rat on Thursday, according to several neighborhood workers.
Big Sky Balloons & Searchlights of Plainfield, Ill., designed the first inflatable nylon rat in 1990 for a Chicago union that reportedly complained the initial design wasn’t “mean enough.”
The company currently offers several models of “Scabby the Rat” in different colors and sizes ranging from 6- to 25-feet tall.
It was unclear where Empire State Realty got its cat, but Big Sky founder Mike O’Connor told the New Yorker in 2000 that he once sold a giant cat — “actually a cougar, but it looked like a cat” — to a bank that similarly deployed it against protesters with a balloon rat.
Neither of the unions, MBD nor Empire State Realty returned requests for comment.
