For a few inspiring hours Thursday afternoon, pizza rat finally got the recognition he deserved.
The rat’s seconds-long struggle to drag a piece of pizza down some subway stairs made him a hero to the city’s struggling millennials, who already celebrated his efforts with a viral YouTube video, many copy-rat videos, and topical Halloween costumes, T-shirts, and mugs.
But it wasn’t until yesterday that the rodent’s valiant effort was apparently commemorated via an honorary street naming. A green sign reading “PIZZA RAT BLVD” appeared on a pole at Franklin and India Avenues in Greenpoint sometime Thursday afternoon, and quickly spread to the Instagram feeds of Brooklynites.
Unfortunately, it was just a prop for Tina Fey’s Netflix series, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, according to ABC News. (Maybe it’s time for pizza rat to get his own TV show?)
“They had notified us about it in advance,” an employee of the 3 Roots Cafe, which is adjacent to the signpost, told ABC News. “It was only up for a few hours. There’s always a lot of filming around in the area.”
But it’s still possible to change “PIZZA RAT BLVD” from a television prop into an actual street name. Under the process called co-naming, all someone would have to do is get 75 percent of a street’s residents and business owners to sign a petition in support of the name change, convince the local community board’s Traffic & Transportation Committee to approve the petition, and then lobby the New York City Council to give Pizza Rat Boulevard its stamp of approval.
With a little grassroots organizing, we can make sure pizza rat is never forgotten.
