Crooked Beat Records was a staple Adams Morgan record store for 12 years when it closed its storefront in 2016. Human residents of D.C. loved it, and apparently so did rodents.

“Yes. The rumors were true. There were rat tunnels were going as far as 28 feet below our old location in D.C. … it was a city within a city under the store,” Crooked Beat wrote in a Facebook post over the weekend announcing that it would not be moving back to Adams Morgan. The store was apparently in the middle of negotiations with a building owner trying to open a location in its old neighborhood, but couldn’t reach a deal and withdrew its offer.

Crooked Beat owner Bill Daly tells DCist high rent has been a serious problem as he tries to look for a new location in the city. He says he’s offering to pay 30 to 35 percent more in rent than he paid for his old Adams Morgan spot, but things always end up being more expensive than that. He is “shying away more from D.C. because we’re running out of options with the rents,” Daly says. “We’re kind of hitting a dead end.”

So District fans of the store will have to keep making the trek up to Fairfax Street in Alexandria, where Crooked Beat opened up its new location six months after leaving the city. This might be less convenient, but perhaps it’s better than years past, when people were (knowingly or unknowingly) sharing their favorite record store with a rat metropolis.

Daly says that his Facebook description of the rat problem at the old location is not an exaggeration. At the time of the Adams Morgan closure, Daly posted an update to Facebook blaming “constant, aggravating, and very stressful” building conditions for his decision not to renew the store’s five-year lease on its Adams Morgan location. The conditions were bad enough that Daly says they were causing him “serious respiratory problems.”

“I kept going to the doctor, and the doctor sat me down and told me ‘you’ve been overexposed to rat antigens,'” Daly says. Every day he was coming into work and cleaning rat feces and urine out of his store, he says, and it eventually started to take a toll on his health. The smell was noxious, “ammonia mixed with barnyard mixed with sewage,” as Daly describes it. Customers started to notice the problem too, taking note of the rat feces and one particularly urine-soaked wall. In quiet moments, Daly says you could even hear the rodents scuttling around in the ceiling.

“One time a customer told me ‘it sounds like chihuahuas are living in your ceiling,'” Daly says. “Actually, it was rats.”

When an exterminator eventually came to assess the situation, Daly says he was told there were 28 feet of tunnels under the store, and a host of what the exterminator called “grandfather rats” living above the recess lighting. What is a grandfather rat, the bravest among you may ask? They’re old, huge rats that “kind of waddle when they walk,” Daly says.

For most people living in D.C., these rats complaints won’t come as a surprise—the city is full of rodents. Complaints about rats have more than doubled since 2015, and the District is looking at some novel ways to combat the problem, including digital modeling and legislation.

Rat problem aside, Daly says Crooked Beat never wanted to leave its Adams Morgan location—the store had a solid, loyal base of clientele in the city. Some District customers have pared down their visits since the record store moved. “Our number-one customer for like seven years comes like once a month now” after coming three times a week for years, Daly says. “He probably has like 15,000 records. He would ride his bike there. There were a lot of guys like him that would come downtown, and I just felt that loyalty there. There’s an audience there for us,” Daly says.

Crooked Beat is still sniffing around for space in D.C. But Daly says the high cost of operating in the city makes a small business like his difficult to operate. He’s not sure whether they’ll ever be able to come back to the District, he says, but he hasn’t yet given up hope.