Dogs are so numerous in New York, indeed, that they have already become a nuisance," the journalist Charles Dawson Shanly wrote in The Atlantic in 1872. He was annoyed by "all the barking ... and there is a good deal of it." Other New Yorkers feared that the dogs roaming the streets were "deleterious to health..." Anxieties escalated to the point that "weakminded people began to look upon Ponto's kennel in the back yard as a very Pandora's box of maladies too numerous and appalling to be contemplated without terror.
I'm sorry, dog lovers. There are too many of you," Chloë Sevigny told Rolling Stone in January. "Why Does Everyone Hate My Dog?" a writer for New York magazine wondered earlier this year.
Dogs are everywhere in New York. They play, walk, and-controversially-poop in the same streets and parks that everyone else enjoys, just as they have for centuries. Sharing public places with dogs might seem easy enough, but in a city so densely packed, space can feel zero sum.
Back in Shanly's era, New Yorkers weren't too concerned about pet dogs-but they were very worried about strays. Around the middle of the 19th century, officials devised a brutal method to deal with them: Police would round up unattended dogs, bring them to the newly created pound...
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