Non-fiction corner: A phenomenally weird tale of a man and his rodent metropolis

There used to be a guy who’d turn up around New York wearing a two-tone Day-Glo mohawk, a pair of coordinating rats perched atop his shoulders. Tourists gawked; locals mostly hurried their steps.

Notwithstanding the ever-smaller dogs favored by many of Manhattan’s elite, genus Rattus has never quite caught on with polite society.

Perhaps society should reconsider. As Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden make plain in their entertaining, phenomenally weird “Rat City,” there is a great deal more connecting us with our ubiquitous furry neighbors than we might imagine.

The authors’ unorthodox thesis pairs well with their unusual methodology, signaled by the book’s wordy subtitle: “Rat City” may well be the world’s first-ever work of socio-biographical-scientific pop history.

The biography at the heart of this improbable mishmash focuses on a person who, himself, combined some rather disparate qualities. Born in rural Tennessee in 1917, John Bumpass Calhoun — known as Jack to friends and family — was a devotee of nature from early childhood, a “country boy with his own small-bore shotgun,” ever curious about the inner workings of the animal world.

His curiosity would lead him to an ecology Ph.D. at Northwestern, then a post at Johns Hopkins, where his tale first collides with the bigger, furrier themes of the book. Beset, in the 1940s, by a near-Hamelinlevel rat infestation, Baltimore turned to Calhoun and a group of his colleagues for solutions.

Calhoun’s idea? The team should build their own city block, seed it with vermin and take notes. What ensues is the story not of one Rat City, but of a decades-long succession of Rat Townships and Rat Villages around the country, interspersed with the occasional Mouse Metropolis.

Far from eradicating Baltimore’s rodent population, Calhoun and his team of researchers became interested in the dynamics of their rats, specifically in how they responded to changes in their surroundings. The scientists’ conclusion, reached after much habitat-tinkering and behind-the-scenes academic drama: Not just the communal health but the individual psychological well-being of the Norway rat “must break down under the social pressures generated by population.”

The implications for humans living in crowded cities seemed obvious; Ramsden and Adams (a historian of science and an economist, respectively) tease out these lessons and then watch how they bounced across the interdisciplinary landscape from architecture to pharmacology.

Rat lovers, beware: On page after page, especially in the earlier chapters, vermin are poisoned, vivisected and bludgeoned; there are various “stress experiments,” toxic injections and forced exercise.

There are also lengthy descriptions of the subjects’ “ritualized courtship,” as well as copious rat-on-rat violence.

In the latter two activities especially, Calhoun and his “Space Cadets” — so called for their interest in the behavioral effects of the physical environment — noted the gravest deviations from the norm as a result of increased density, even when resources remained abundant. Drifting into pathological withdrawal or compulsive sociality, the animals under study “ceased to be rats,” and eventually stopped breeding altogether.

In a 1962 report, Calhoun called this condition “the behavioral sink.” The phrase caught on: Tom Wolfe liked it; so did Hunter S. Thompson. The anxiety that such a sink might be waiting (or might already be taking hold) in America’s troubled cities produced a small welter of panic amid certain segments of the policymaking beau monde. (The Space Cadets’ own Leonard Duhl would take up an influential position at the newly formed Department of Housing and Urban Development.)

“Everything seemed to be coming together,” the authors write. They mean the various threads of Calhoun’s life and work — though they could as easily be speaking of strands of their own narrative.

In fact, neither quite merge. Among other things, Adams and Ramsden’s evident admiration for their subject clashes discomfitingly with what even they acknowledge are “the racial undertones” and general dehumanization in his equation of rats and lower-income city dwellers.

Moreover, the case for Calhoun as a major force in American urbanism is doubly undermined by the timing — as early as the 1930s, reduced density had already been a stated objective of everyone from Frank Lloyd Wright to Franklin Roosevelt. And then there were the critical flaws of such insights as the ecologist did, later, contribute — too little density is the problem now most afflicting cities in the United States, driving up both home prices and social isolation.

None of this detracts too much from what remains a freaky romp down a peculiar passage in the history of ideas, full of oddball cameos (Aldous Huxley! Buckminster Fuller!) and some very sharp science writing.

Divorced from its unseemlier echoes — ones that Calhoun, to his credit, never sought to amplify — the underlying moral of “Rat City” is also worth pondering, especially by urbanites inclined to take a too-blithe view of their own presumed superiority over the lesser orders. The rat is us.

Ian Volner writes about architecture, design and urbanism. His most recent book is “Jorge Pardo: Public Projects and Commissions.”