Rodent Control in Goodyear Heights

Goodyear Heights began in 1910, when Frank Seiberling bought farmland northeast of the Goodyear plant to house his workers. The oldest streets still have those early homes, but much of the neighborhood filled in later with houses built from the 1940s into the 1970s. Goodyear Heights Metro Park, with its woods, trails and Alder Pond, sits along the east side near the Tallmadge line.

Old houses, postwar houses and a big block of woods all in one neighborhood mean the calls here come from a few directions at once.

Mice coming out of the Metro Park woods

Houses backing onto the woods near the Metro Park get white-footed mice and house mice every fall. They come out of the leaf litter and brush, cross the yard under the cover of shrubs, and find the garage or a basement window. A woodpile stacked against the house gives them a perfect halfway point. Move firewood out away from the walls, cut shrubs back from the foundation and check the bottom seal on the garage door.

After that, it's the house itself. The older homes have the stone and block problems found all over Akron. The postwar homes are tighter, but gaps around utility lines, dryer vents and the garage are just as useful to a mouse. Mouse control takes care of the ones already inside, and rodent-proofing the house is what keeps the woods from refilling it.

Rats in the older blocks off East Market

Closer to East Market Street and the old plant, the lots are narrower and detached garages are common. That's where rat calls tend to come from: burrows under a garage slab, a path worn along the fence, a compost pile that's been visited. A rat exterminator starts outside, finds the burrows and sets locked stations along the fence and foundation before sealing the garage.

The postwar blocks in the middle of the neighborhood sit somewhere between the two. A lot of those houses have a basement, an attached or tuck-under garage and a small backyard shed, so one property can have mice in the house and a rat under the shed at the same time. It's worth having the tech look at all of it on one visit rather than piecing it together over a season.

Tallmadge lies to the east, and Ellet is south across the highway. If you're not sure which rodent you've got, telling rats from mice by their droppings helps, and so does describing it to us on the phone.

Stucco, brick and the bottom edge of a Goodyear Heights house

Warren Manning laid out the first Goodyear Heights streets in 1912 and 1913, and Pittsburgh architect George Schwann drew many of the early houses. They were brick or stucco singles with five or six rooms, and plenty of them are still lived in today. Stucco makes a good, tight skin. The trouble is where it stops. On an old stucco house the bottom edge tends to crack or pull away from the foundation, leaving a gap that leads behind the wall. Mice find that gap and travel up inside the wall cavity, which is why you hear them in the living room before you ever see one in the basement.

Brick homes have their own version. The mortar along the bottom few courses goes soft and sandy after a century of Akron winters, and a mouse can widen a loose joint. Walk the outside of the house at ground level with a screwdriver. If the mortar crumbles when you scrape it, that spot needs repointing and rodent sealing. Goodyear Heights borders North Hill to the west, and the older housing on both sides of that line shares a lot of the same problems.

Around Goodyear Heights: Goodyear Heights Metro Park · Alder Pond · East Market Street · Newton Street · The Tallmadge line (ZIP 44305)

Also serving Highland Square and West Akron, Firestone Park, Kenmore, North Hill, Ellet, Merriman Valley, Cuyahoga Falls, Stow, Barberton.