UES Woman Bugs Out After Bathroom Ceiling Collapse Unleashes Cockroaches

An Upper East Side woman recently bugged out of her studio apartment after the collapse of wet ceiling board in her bathroom let loose a bevy of cockroaches.

Known to her followers as Carolyn D., the shaken Gothamite shared her night of trauma in a now-viral TikTok video, and if that seems like a strange thing to tell the world about, well . . . it’s her life, and her bugs, and she tells her tale with such sincerity that few viewers, if they follow such things as TikTok, would fail to be affected.

For those not on TikTok, it’s an old story, of course. What’s the line, cockroaches will outlive us all?

Carolyn D. is a 30-year-old marketing professional. Cockroaches, unlike waterbugs—an insect with which they are often confused—don’t bite humans, but they do scare the “bejeezus” out of us as they scurry across the floor, on the countertop, in the sink, or in a cabinet.

Most New Yorkers who live in old buildings agree that this is why God made glue traps.

But as the Kafkaesque saga of Carolyn D. reminds us, life itself can be a trap. She did nothing wrong. Let us assume her studio apartment was as clean as clean could be. But a clean apartment, as longtime hive dwellers know, can suffer the sloth of a neighbor in myriad ways, none of them pleasant.

And even if your neighbor is a neat freak like Felix Unger of The Odd Couple fame, one little water leak, over time—let alone a large and sudden release of water from an apartment above you—spells trouble with a capital “T.”

The incident occurred in July in the $2,400-a-month apartment where Carolyn D. has lived for three years.

“I get back to New York City, to my apartment, and I am in my bathroom, like washing my face, brushing my teeth, and I see out of the corner of my eye a giant crack over my toilet, like on the ceiling of my bathroom I never noticed before. . . .

“It was a giant crack in my ceiling, It looks like the whole thing was about to bust through and, like, fall to the ground.”

The time is 11pm. She texted her landlord—who she thoughtfully didn’t name—“Hey . . . what do I do?”

“I’ll come by tomorrow,” was the reply.

“OK, he must not be that concerned about it even though it looks like it’s literally about to bust through. . . . ”

Carloyn then went to bed only to have her trip to dreamland delayed.

“I hear things falling in my bathroom,” Carolyn continues. “So I get up, turn on the lights, I go look, pieces are falling down, and while I’m looking at it, the entire thing busts open and falls—the entire ceiling of my bathroom falls down to the ground.

“Guess what comes with it? A million cockroaches, everywhere! I have never started scream–crying so quick in my entire life.”

“So I run to my couch because I like can’t even be on my floor right now because there’s so many roaches and dust and things falling through the ceiling—and water. Water from my neighbor’s apartment.”

Traumatizing as all this was, Carolyn’s landlord quickly made the necessary repairs, and her renter’s insurance covered the cost of a hotel stay in the interim.

Though she told the New York Post she wouldn’t be renewing her lease, a review of her TikTok account shows Carolyn D. to be a resilient, generally life-loving person with no more anxiety than any other 30-year-old single woman who talks about herself on social media.

One presumes she’ll be fine—the farther away from cockroaches the better.