Photo: Christopher Robbins
On a steamy Sunday afternoon in July, Kevin Bryant was sitting on a bench in Bed-Stuy’s Herbert Von King Park. He was watching an off-leash French bulldog happily take a shit in the grass right next to a fresh sign that read “No Pets.”
“That’s the problem right there,” Bryant said, shaking his head. “People ignore the sign. They still put their dog in the grass there. When the dog park —” he pointed to the corner of the park with a large shade tarp drawn over it. “Look how nice that dog park is!”
Just a few years ago, dogs ruled this filthy town. They graced the covers of our magazines and played leading roles in our dreams of post-pandemic city life. In the summer of 2021, back when the landlords were running scared and office life was dead, why wouldn’t you get a dog? Who doesn’t love dogs?
Three years later, we have an answer: Lots and lots of people. On Reddit and in our piss-soaked streets, the dog backlash is in full swing. As New York becomes more cartoonishly difficult for human beings to live in, the existence of dogs feels like mockery. We are metaphorically, and literally, sick of their crap.
Gale Brewer, who has been working in city government since the Carter administration and who is on her fourth nonconsecutive City Council term, has seen dog-related gripes swing sympathies. Two decades ago, her office would field a litany of calls about the lack of dog runs. But now that dogs have more dedicated places to be, people have different complaints. “Forget the dog runs,” Brewer told me. “The next issue: people not keeping their dogs on the leash.”
This dynamic — of dogs and their owners refusing to be penned into a dog run to the consternation of dogless park users — is especially acute at Von King. “We had the most — more than Prospect Park, more than Central Park, more than some of these bigger parks — we had the most complaints out of any other place about off-leash and unmanageable dogs,” said Scarlett Clark, a volunteer who helps lead the Friends of Herbert Von King Dog Park in Bed-Stuy. This helps explain the “No Pets” signs that now cover some two-thirds of Von King. The Parks Department denied that Von King was leading in off-leash complaints but confirmed that the reason behind the signs was off-leash dogs ruining the grass fields, which required them to be reseeded. “We are committed to ensuring our public greenspaces can support the diverse ways that New Yorkers use them, and we are grateful to the many community groups who look after dog runs throughout the city,” said department spokesperson Chris Clark.
Dogs in the sun ….
Photo: Christopher Robbins
Why don’t dog owners stick to the dog runs? Clark (the dog-run volunteer, not the Parks spokesperson!) who says she covers 15 miles a day as a dog-walker and visits parks all over Brooklyn, has a few theories. One is that there is a common misconception about the existence of off-leash hours: If your park has a dog run, there are no off-leash hours. That’s what the dog run is: The place for your dog to be off-leash.
Another might be categorized as a misconception about just how “nice” the Von King dog run is.
“It’s just this weird clash of, people still want to use the park, but then people don’t want to go to the dog run because it’s flooded and a literal germ pool and mosquito attractant — we just had algae growing last week in the water,” Clark said.
In her two years at the helm, Clark has had to untangle a dizzying array of canine-and-human problems and estimated that she’s spent 80 hours in meetings with other volunteers and representatives from the city. That includes dealing with the flooding, which makes the run a breeding ground for disease. (Earlier this year, there was a still-unconfirmed leptospirosis outbreak at McCarren Park.)
… and dogs when it rains.
Photo: Christopher Robbins
Also at Von King, dozens of pooches have been injured by the same dog, whose owner insists on returning to the run despite the aggression. Another guy got stabbed with an ice pick this past spring after his dog attacked a group of dogs. “He was still walking around after, didn’t seem like life-threatening stabs,” an alleged witness wrote on Reddit, where all NYC dog drama lives. (The NYPD confirmed that an 18-year-old who lives across the street has been charged with assault.)
“Dealing with it, it’s really hard,” Clark says cheerfully. “I am a sensitive person, so I just eat a lot of sugar. So much sugar.”
Just as with every single other aspect of New York City, huge piles of money and resources tend to make managing dog parks much easier. At the brand-new $70 million Gansevoort Peninsula on Manhattan’s West Side, the dog run is cleaned twice a day and power-washed once a week, which is what you get when you’re lucky enough to frequent one of the five dog runs managed by the Hudson River Park Trust. The new run — actually three separate structures, one for big dog, one for small dogs, and a third “training area” — was designed by the firm that worked on the High Line, Field Operations, and no detail was overlooked. During the design phase, someone (probably a dog?) pointed out that the two-inch-wide bench slats used across the park were big enough for a pup to catch their paws in, so they were redrawn to 1.5 inches. You might also notice sets of metal squares at the base of these seating areas: This is dachshund-escape prevention, in case any of the small friends get a notion to wriggle past the fence and out onto the West Side Highway.
Dog runs that aren’t fortunate enough to be managed by trusts propped up by corporate cash suffer the same fate as our busted public fields, playgrounds, and restrooms. Kevin Bryant, the Von King parkgoer, who has lived in Bed-Stuy for 30 years, said he was shocked when he recently went to a movie night in Bryant Park. “It’s a private park in Manhattan on 42nd Street,” he said, understandably conflating its access situation (the park is actually public) with how the park is maintained and policed. “I was wondering why they got movie night every Monday and we don’t have it here. People were out there with wine and blankets.”
Despite Eric Adams’s campaign promise to set aside one percent of the city budget to the Parks Department, something that hasn’t happened since 1977, the mayor has defunded parks. This summer, Adams and the City Council gave Parks $618 million, a $20 million cut from last year. While the Parks budget has increased by more than $200 million compared to a decade ago, this year’s figure was the lowest share of the city budget in a decade — nearly half of what Adams promised. In other words, you should reserve some of the anger you have for the unfixed Weimaraner taking a dump in the Long Meadow next to your cheese board for the mayor who allocates more money to paying for NYPD overtime ($788 million!) than operating the entire city’s park system.
“Parks still needs that one percent,” Brewer said, before stating the obvious: Dog runs aren’t for dogs; they’re for people. “I’ve been to two marriages that I can think of where people met in the dog run,” Brewer said. “This is a big tough city. And I feel very, very strongly about anything we can do to build community.”
Clark and Von King’s dog community, with the help of Councilmember Chi Ossé, was recently able to secure more than $1 million in discretionary funding to patch up the dog run there, a feat that Clark in part attributes to all the off-leash-dog complaints.
But Clark predicted that the off-leash-dog problem is going to get worse in central Brooklyn before it gets better. That’s because the Von King dog-run renovations line up with dog-run construction at Maria Hernandez and Irving Square in Bushwick. All those dogs with no sanctioned place to bark and hump and frolic and fight. The Parks Department is aware of this and says it’s paying attention.
“Between 2025 and 2027, we are going to have a very hard time because every dog run is going to be under construction at the same time. And I’m a little terrified about it,” Clark said. “Actually, I think it’s going to be very, very crazy.”
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