... out of about 6 plants, three of them were chewed down to the trunk. There are some nodes where I see tiny leaves about as big as a grain of couscous peeking out. Will these sticks with baby leaves survive?

My bait in a Victor rat trap is a nice big juicy red grape. Today, after baiting 4 rat traps, I finally caught the latest chipmunk that has been leaving messes inside my BBQ grill with its cover on. In the last 4-5 years, I have lost count on all the rodents these traps have caught, but its well over 300! Suggest you set out a few of the regular wooden and spring wire traps, and bait them with grapes. Those poison blocks just don't seem to work very well. Strychnine (stricnine) works, but they need to ingest a bit of it before it will work on them. Its very hard to find that too.
Good luck!

Can you screen the windowbox with chicken wire, or something like that?

UPDATE: I took the plants inside last night just to deprive them of the basil. I left the mint and rosemary outside. I'll be darned if they didnt start on those two plants! They didn't like the mint I guess, since I saw whole leaves on the sill just sitting there (next to the rat blocks. grr.) And some of the rosemary branches are broken though not chewed up.

Ksrogers: thanks for the tip! I did consider setting out traps but I have to find out if that's legal for me to set out on a fire escape in the city (not that it's legal for me to set out plants :)) Any tips for disposing of the "game"? I've never trapped them before...plus, the rats in NYC are gangsta, if you know what I'm saying ;)

drewsmaga: I'll try that too, I'll go get some at HD today. If it's succesful though, I don't know what I'll do when the plants get taller and they cant grow out the top of the cage.

Rats can sometimes sneak through regular chicken wire. In NY, I believe its totally legal to trap a vermin like a rat. They will be dead, so a burial will be needed. Here, if I dig up the area outside my vegetable garden, I would find all kinds of animal bones, all the way up to a Woodchuck! Check my page here on this web site. The photo is of a 1/2 inch diameter steel wire spring trap, thats a 12"x12" square. It takes an 80 pound pull to set the traps two springs, and if tripped, it can snap a mans arm or leg in two..

Ksrogers: WOW! That trap is something to behold! I will see if I can convince the man of the house to take care of that...I may not have the constitution for fishing them off the fire escape, running them through my apartment, then downstairs to the garbage! :) I saw them today for the first time, huge suckers, the size of a small butternut squash, though a lot less appealing.

On Catnip: 6 hours after setting of said nip on the fire escape in the afternoon, I checked on the fire escape to find it yanked out of its 3 inch pot. This either means catnip does NOT repel rats, or that they hated it so much they had to kill it.

NY rats are big, and even the Victor rat traps may not work well. For the woodchuck (notice those nice big long front teeth) a rat tap would have only be a slight inconvienence. Rats in NY are big! Victor doesn't seem to make anything bigger than the regular wooden rat traps. I would like to see a trap maybe twice the size of the current ones. The woodchuck trap was baited with a whole apple dangling from the trigger mechanism. The link at the bottom is where I got the biggest traps from. Another choice for several 'serious' rat traps other than the common wooden Victor brand: http://www.bugspray.com/#animal%20product%20catalog

Here is a link that might be useful: Lethal Animal Traps