He’s the pied drummer of Park Slope!
The city’s wrongly slapped a Park Sloper with $600 in fines when inspectors found evidence of rats infesting his 15th Street building — because the homeowner insists he’d already driven the pests out by beating on his drum.
“The whole house had rats before, but since I started to play drums I found out none of them are in the house, they’re afraid of the drumming,” said Solomon Shlomo. “I want to open an investigation to find why I received two summons from nothing.”
The city’s health department inspected Shlomo’s pad between Fifth and Sixth avenues on two occasions following a 2015 fire that gutted the building’s top floor, and discovered rat burrows and hair, in addition to piles of debris inspectors claimed would attract the pesky rodents.
And Shlomo in no way denies the furry undesirables called his house a home — once upon a time — but that they’d all fled well before city inspectors showed up as a result of his new-found drumming hobby, which he claims scared the bejesus out of his cheese-loving roommates.
“I was drumming and I had the rats, and all of a sudden, while I was drumming the rats were flying out,” Shlomo said. “And in a couple of days I didn’t have any rats.”
Schlomo took his drumming defense to the city’s Office of Hearings and Tribunals after receiving the summons, but judges there weren’t hearing any of it.
“They didn’t believe me,” Shlomo said. “They thought it was a hoax.”
He then petitioned the mayor’s office for relief from the fines, which he claimed forwarded his letters back to the Health Department, and Councilman Brad Lander’s office was unable to get the agency to drop its case against the Park Slope man, he said.
He now plans on writing Gov. Cuomo, whom he hopes will launch an investigation that will overturn the violations.
In the meantime, Shlomo plans on keeping up with his novel form of pest control.
“Every two or three days, I play a couple moments to make sure they don’t come anymore,” he said.
