On June 10, 1974, a large group of passengers were evacuated from city buses in midtown. They were crawling with roaches, according to an account in The New York Times. The city promised to step up its abatement program, and blamed the roach infestations on the buses, as New Yorkers do, on the intense heat and humidity.

A few months later, writing about Hollywood’s fascination with down-and-out New York, Vincent Canby wrote: “New York City has become a metaphor for what looks like the last days of American civilization.”

But it was almost a decade later that legendary Long Island entomologist Austin Frishman, wearing a bolo tie and a belt buckle of two crossed guns and a scorpion, arrived in New York City to promote a new product. They called it Combat.

The Metropolitan Desk of The New York Times treated him like Harold Hill, another huckster arriving in town: “With flags unfurled, a tactical public-relations squadron spearheaded by ‘a top, eminent entomologist’ surrounded by publicity agents swept into New York yesterday, carrying the good word to residents of the city, and network television viewers everywhere, that their worries were finally over, cockroach-wise. Creators of the ‘ultimate victory’ in the roach war do this from time to time.”

Well, we’re a suspicious lot.

Dr. Frishman would then go on to help develop MaxForce, a cockroach gel bait, for Clorox, still a standby favorite of supers everywhere.

By 1988, Combat—a product of American Cyanamid, makers of Pine-Sol and Old Spice!—was selling $40 million worth of product a year, a quarter of that in New York City alone. By that year, the city had observed, The Times said, a 58 percent reduction in roach-infestation complaints.

Today there are N.Y.U. students living in the East Village who could not identify a roach if they saw one, or distinguish it from what New Yorkers call a “water bug.” (They are two distinct species: the larger, scarier “water bug,” the American cockroach, generally lives and breeds outside of houses and just comes in on a scavenging mission for food; the smaller German cockroach, only five-eighths of an inch long, was the terror of New York in the 1970’s.)

“The cockroaches aren’t the problem they were 10, 15 years ago,” said Doug Mampe, entomologist and pest control specialist, of DM Associates.

There are now, actually, fewer roaches than there used to be, it seems. First of all because much of the city has given up on those foul-smelling sprays that roaches smell just as clearly as we do.

Second of all because we all live in such nice houses. No cracking foundations, “voids” in the walls, dyspeptic plumbing. Right?

They are, more or less, gone from Times Square—like the live peep shows, the hustlers, the junkies, and The New York Times.

Were the cockroaches all snapped up in the bitty jaws of the ever-growing swarm of handbag dogs? That seems unlikely.

But as New York suffers the opposite of white flight—as Manhattan becomes the rich, creamy center of an Oreo—the amount of substandard housing in the skinny borough has decreased, and so has white people’s tolerance for vermin.

Gentrification! It’s more powerful—or at least more thorough—than the nuclear bomb, which urban folklore has always told us only the cockroaches will survive.

Which is another way of saying that there might not actually be fewer roaches. There just might be fewer white people with roaches, because white people overall live in better buildings.

And so we have a city in which, according to the city, 57 percent of poverty-level Spanish-speaking people use pesticide sprays and bombs, compared to 27 percent of poverty-level white households.

Last year, a couple subletting in the Ansonia on the Upper West Side even went so far as to sue the building over a few roaches. It was uninhabitable, they said. Well, sure—for a lawyer and an equity fund consultant.

“IF YOU OWN a co-op you paid $5 million for, you are going to put a lot more effort into making it roach-free than if you are renting a $2,000 studio,” said Jack Wiler of Acme Exterminating (he is also a poet!). “The people paying $500 are willing to tolerate pests. A person paying $7,000 a month isn’t.”

And so buildings like Trump Tower don’t put up with roaches—they have a full-time engineer who deals with bug displacement.

But folks who do cleaning for a living say trust no one. “There aren’t any roaches on Seventh Avenue,” said one cleaning guy who wanted to remain anonymous. “The buildings there, they put out a lot of poison.” But he’s seen them in high-end buildings on 42nd Street—and one building near the Chrysler? “A lot of mouses and roaches,” he said. “And that is a special building, fancy.”

High-end buildings like 76 Crosby Street, at the corner of Spring, where Harvey Weinstein once lived and where blog mogul Nick Denton watches Balthazar from his windows, don’t have roaches because there’s someone watching out for them.

They go, perhaps, over the top in vermin reduction. There the staff bleaches the sidewalks, washes the walls—and last year, when they briefly had fruit flies in the compactor room, they cleaned that sucker inside and out and that was done. (Someone was throwing coconuts down the chute.)

They’ll even stand out front and yell at people who let their dogs pee in front of the building—and when that wasn’t enough, they sprayed the block with dog repellent. “It’s about respect,” said an employee of the building. “The neighborhood is changing and we’re trying to make it positive.”

The chances of a roach daring to scuttle on Mr. Denton’s ebonized floorboards are less than nil.

But the building employee himself lived in a roach-infested apartment for years. He finally just gave up and moved.

It doesn’t take such high-maintenance, millionaire-coddling behavior to eliminate roaches. Buildings like the Clinton Hill Cooperative Apartments, a cluster of 12 buildings on the border of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, stay roach-free the old-fashioned way. “This place is great. They put slips on the doors once a week and you sign it, and get your place sprayed,” said a resident.

The Chelsea Landmark, at 25th and Sixth—one of those big horrid disaster buildings made possible by Rudy Giuliani’s rezoning of Chelsea—is home to New York’s most famous governor-serving working girl, Ashley Alexandra Dupre. Turns out even the hookers don’t have roaches anymore. (Though probably all the strippers do.)

“My girlfriend said she hasn’t seen any nor has she seen them spraying the building—we actually haven’t ever seen the super,” said someone who lives two floors below Dupre. “It’s a really, really nice place, real clean.”

Plus, everyone’s distracted. In our snuggly, post-collegiate, high-thread-count city, the cockroaches have lost their pride of place to that hot new crawly menace, the bedbug.

“Everyone is looking for the silver bullet right now for bedbugs, and we don’t have it right now,” said Mampe. “The hotel industry is scared to death.”

IT WAS ONLY four years ago that the average Manhattan apartment sale hit that magic number—a million dollars. Now it is around $1.7 million—and the median price now is not far from a million.

Between 1970 and 2005, the population of foreign-born New Yorkers—more likely to be poor—doubled, to almost three million. But fewer than 15 percent of them live in Manhattan, while about a quarter of all housing units are in Manhattan.

And the housing stock got more expensive, particularly in Manhattan. From 1994 to 2002, rent regulations were removed from more than 100,000 apartments.

Throughout the country—from California (in the Salinas Valley, a study of the homes of pregnant Latinas found that 60 percent of homes had cockroaches) to Florida (in 1986, a study of low-income apartments in the Southeast found that 97 percent were infested)—where the poor are, there are cockroaches.

Whatever could it be about poor people that makes roaches love them so? Perhaps it is the bad apartments in which they choose to live?

As of 2003, of white people in New York City who made more than $75,000 a year, only 12 percent reported seeing cockroaches. Of white folk who made less than $25,000 a year, 21 percent had roaches.

Nearly half of blacks who made $25K a year or less reported cockroaches—and so did nearly three-fifths of “Hispanics” in that income bracket. (Need we correlate that, in 2003, it was found that nearly half the black men in New York City aged 16 to 64 did not have employment?)

Well-off African-Americans were actually just as likely as poor whites to have cockroaches, but well-off Hispanics had as few roaches as rich whites. The “Asian and other” among us were definitely more likely to have roaches than nearly all white people.

And in another study in East Harlem at the same time, four out of five households had cockroaches.

Let’s put it geographically. In 2003, 30 percent of households in New York City overall reported roaches. That percentage declines on the Upper East Side, midtown, the West Village—down to as low as 11 percent. That percentage hovers around the average of near-Brooklyn, the Upper West Side and near-Queens—and goes way up in the Bronx and central Brooklyn, topping out at 57 percent.

In the 311 stats from last year, the city had 5,373 vermin (that’s rodents and cockroaches) complaints in Manhattan; that number for both the Bronx and Brooklyn was about double that.

Those vermin complaints have escalated since 2002, in every borough—although they are near to flat in Manhattan.

But six years ago, there were half the number of complaints in the Bronx and Brooklyn that there are today.

AT THE CORNER of Lorimer and Maujer in Williamsburg, just up from the Lorimer L stop, they have just built some fancy new condos amid the other fancy new condos and some of the old buildings.

This is the liminal zone for New York’s roach population. Old, decrepit buildings lean against each other and against the spiffy new condos like people falling asleep on the train; owners of million-dollar condos live cheek-by-jowl with families that have been here since before it was a “hot” neighborhood. Tactics for making sure the roaches stay on the right side of the wall, according to the locals, can be extreme.

“They bomb the furniture,” a contractor on the site of the spiffy new condo told a reporter. “They bomb all the new furniture and stuff coming in here with roach spray.”

The owner was across the street petting a Rottweiler.

“Where are the roaches? I’ll tell you where all the roaches are,” he said. “They’re in all the cardboard. We seal all the holes, we seal all the doors, and make sure everything stays clean.”

The neighborhood isn’t anything like roach-free, either. Here is a scene from the post office on Lorimer Street:

“Oh, man, it was a stompfest for a whole minute,” said one guy, of visiting his neighbor’s apartment long ago. “There were small ones, big ones, baby ones, pregnant ones. …”

“Growing up, they were like roommates to me,” said another guy. “I’d pick one and play with it, flick it.”

“Remember during the winter and stuff,” said the first one, “there were always mad roaches by the radiator?”

Everyone said, “Yeah.” But where have they gone?

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. We live the same; it’s just not the same with the roaches anymore. Maybe it’s the tenants or something. … We didn’t get an exterminator or anything.”

“They sort of just mysteriously come and go,” said a girl who lives on the block, on Maujer St. “I mind them—I’m just broke.”

“I don’t know nothing about roaches,” said her super, Pablo. “Roaches come and go, I don’t want to answer any questions because I don’t know.”

And there is an old Puerto Rican guy who hangs out on the street by there, called Candellero.

“You pay a lot of rent now,” he said, pointing at those new condos. “What do I pay? You want to know what I pay? Guess. One hundred twenty. I’ve lived here for 48 years. Same apartment. It’s worth it. It’s quiet. Some roaches. But it’s quiet.”

“Rent is $2,000 sometimes now,” he said. “You can’t pay, then you have to move. Then where you live? The park over there,” he suggested. But he warned: “There are roaches there.”

IN THE CITY that has lived past the end of civilization, what was once the everyman plague isn’t everybody’s anymore.

Now more than ever, there are two classes of housing—roach-proof and roach-friendly. That would be: rich and everyone else. But there are border skirmishes when people try to jump up a class.

Some buildings adjacent to the World Trade Center, according to a September 2002 New York Times survey, had experienced turnover as great as 70 percent in the year previous. There were no roaches before then, said a woman named Kim, who has lived in Gateway Plaza since 1990.

“I talked to a doorman who said people had them in the boxes when they moved in and that’s where I got them from,” she said. “After 9/11, when there was grant money and a huge influx of people from the Lower East Side moved in, and they were doing construction all over the place—then I had roaches.”

“After that,” she said, “it was cockroach city. It hasn’t been the same.”

—Additional reporting by Matt Townsend.