{"id":189428,"date":"2026-04-08T11:21:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T11:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/189428\/"},"modified":"2026-04-08T11:21:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T11:21:10","slug":"where-does-a-dog-belong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/189428\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Does a Dog Belong?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Olivia Bannerman, a 28-year-old software designer and part-time model, was standing on a rock in Central Park with her statuesque golden retriever, Violet, waiting for a quorum to assemble. It was the first Sunday in March, and for the past month, Bannerman had been on a bright and photogenic one-woman crusade to address the city\u2019s dog-poop situation. Now, she was hoping to turn it into a movement.<\/p>\n

In the end, it was a small movement. Two of us were reporters. A third was Fern Watt, founder and president of New York Dog Parade, the city\u2019s \u201cpremier dog-culture organization.\u201d The fourth was a friend of Bannerman\u2019s. Bannerman had worried about this. \u201cOne thing I\u2019m running into,\u201d she told me, \u201cis that dog owners are saying, \u2018I don\u2019t want to pick up other people\u2019s poop.\u2019\u201d She understood the feeling, but \u201cif everyone had that sentiment about everything for the history of time, nothing would get done,\u201d which is why she had taken to picking up stray shit herself.<\/p>\n

We fanned out over Sheep Meadow, a place where dogs are theoretically not allowed at any time. \u201cHere\u2019s a turd!\u201d Bannerman said cheerily. \u201cI got a big one!\u201d cried the reporter. A man exercising a spry Shiba Inu called out his thanks, and we explained that we were participating in a community event to pick up dog poop. \u201cThat\u2019s very\u201d \u2014 he hesitated for a long time \u2014 \u201cthoughtful of you.\u201d<\/p>\n

The situation had been exacerbated by the snow, everyone agreed. It had snowed before, but had it always been like this? \u201cI\u2019m just trying to get my kids to school, and we\u2019re basically dodging dog shit on the entire walk,\u201d a 38-year-old mother of two in Greenpoint told me, asking to remain anonymous. She had, in fact, tried to take action herself, creating the Instagram account @GreenpointPooPatrol<\/a> for public shaming, but it had yet to catch on. On the Upper West Side, someone had taken to hanging posters: JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE ENTITLED AND IT\u2019S COLD DOES NOT MEAN IT ISN\u2019T RUDE DISGUSTING PATHETIC + ILLEGAL TO LEAVE YOUR DOG\u2019S FECES ON THE SIDEWALK. They had splurged on color printing. Measured by complaints, tensions were escalating: At the end of February 2025, there had been 650 calls to 311 about dog poop. By the same time this year, the number of calls had already hit 1,541.<\/p>\n

And it wasn\u2019t just the shit: In the past two years, calls about animals in restaurants have more than doubled, and in the years since the pandemic, complaints about off-leash dogs have more than doubled too. In early February, a Chow Chow named Meatball broke free from his owner at Bowling Green, fell onto the subway tracks, hit the third rail, and died. This set off yet another wave of dog discourse, which had less to do with the specific circumstances of Meatball\u2019s obviously tragic death, the details of which were not publicly disclosed, than with the general alleged entitlement of dog owners, who were apparently tearing apart the already fragile fabric of the city by putting dogs in places dogs do not belong. \u201cPet culture,\u201d one extreme Gothamist commenter declared, \u201cpromotes disordered living.\u201d Around this time, inside a Park Slope market, I watched a woman cradle a teacup Pomeranian and tried to determine whether it was nibbling on tiny samples of artisanal cheese.<\/p>\n

The problem, if there is a problem, has less to do with the number of dogs than their shifting place in public life. \u201cIt seems like a kind of arms race,\u201d says Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist studying human-dog relations. \u201cYou have people becoming more and more assertive about including dogs everywhere and then, on the other side, people becoming more and more assertive about their resistance to having dogs everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

On paper, the city\u2019s dog laws are quite clear. Dogs are required at all times to be leashed in public, except in dog runs or during designated hours in particular locations inside certain public parks. Dogs are permitted on the subway but only in a bag. Service dogs \u2014 those that perform specific tasks to help people with disabilities \u2014 can go basically anywhere. Documentation is not required, but an establishment is allowed to ask two things: Is the dog required because of a disability? And what service does the dog provide? This does not apply to emotional-support animals, which, except in matters of housing and employment, are held to the same basic rules as pets.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there wasn\u2019t dog shit all over the sidewalks, then I don\u2019t think dogs would necessarily be coming to a boiling point,\u201d one Greenpoint dog owner in his early 40s reflected. It wasn\u2019t as though he had never pushed the boundaries with his 50-pound supermutt. Yet if he didn\u2019t always follow the letter of the law, he believed he observed the spirit, though he understood that not everyone agreed. Recently, he\u2019d been in Transmitter Park with his dog \u2014 who, yes, was off-leash, but people do that there \u2014 when a guy in the playground area with his kid leaned over the fence. \u201cHe was not even in the vicinity of where my dog was,\u201d he says. \u201cHe said, \u2018Excuse me, you see the sign? It says NO DOGS.\u2019 And I kind of looked at him like, Hey, you must be new here.\u201d Why did he feel so entitled, the guy wanted to know. \u201cAnd so I told him, \u2018Hey, man, you\u2019re here with your family, and I\u2019m here with my family.\u201d<\/p>\n

In seemingly every argument, someone brings up children. \u201cWell, my dog,\u201d someone inevitably says, \u201cis better behaved and less disruptive and more pleasant than your disgusting child.\u201d This is very likely true and generally irrelevant. Dogs are not children. Even people who treat their dogs like children, sociologist Andrea Laurent-Simpson tells me, are \u201cquite aware that their dogs are not actually children.\u201d But Laurent-Simpson, who studies family, fertility, and the relationships between people and their pets, argues dogs have become family nonetheless. \u201cFamily,\u201d she emphasizes. \u201cNot \u2018like\u2019 family but family.\u201d According to a 2023 Pew poll, 97 percent of American pet owners agree, and more than 60 percent of urban pet owners say their pets are as much a part of the family as the human members. But does every member of your family need to be inside the grocery store?<\/p>\n

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Whatever your problem is with life in the city, there is probably some way to implicate the dogs. They are so visible, and there are so many of them. \u201cDogs are so numerous in New York, indeed, that they have already become a nuisance,\u201d poet Charles Dawson Shanly observed in 1872, launching into an ethnographic survey<\/a> of the local canine population. Then there was the question of whether dogs belonged in the city at all. \u201cThere is a place for the dog,\u201d an irritated reader wrote<\/a> the New York Times in 1903, \u201cbut that place is the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back then, stray dogs mingled with working dogs and beloved pets, roaming the city, eating abundant quantities of garbage, and becoming in the process a symptom of the growing city\u2019s chaos. This impression was fostered by the fact that they were occasionally rabid. \u201cHowever rare dog attacks and the incidence of rabies were in reality,\u201d writes historian Catherine McNeur in Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City, \u201cthe newspaper reports that built up their presence made them a larger symbol of the breakdown of civility.\u201d When, in 1811, the city passed its \u201cLaw Concerning Dogs,\u201d people were divided. In addition to imposing a $3 tax on dog owners, the law allowed a newly appointed \u201cDog Register and Collector\u201d to kill any dog found roaming \u201cat large,\u201d but it wasn\u2019t clear how exactly they would differentiate between strays and pets. \u201cThis was less a battle of class,\u201d McNeur concludes, \u201cthan a battle between dog lovers and rabies fearers.\u201d But then concerns about animal welfare rose, and the acute public-health risks faded. Killing dogs in the street became increasingly unacceptable, and rabies vaccines became available. No rabid dogs have been reported in New York since 1954.<\/p>\n

By the early 1970s, the city was once again in chaos. \u201cNew York was on the verge of bankruptcy,\u201d says Michael Brandow, author of New York\u2019s Poop Scoop Law: Dogs, the Dirt, and Due Process. \u201cNothing worked. Police couldn\u2019t protect people, we couldn\u2019t pick up trash, we couldn\u2019t keep the subways running. The streets were dirty. It was a harsh place to live.\u201d In response, people turned to dogs, which offered some combination of protection and companionship. \u201cIt was a palliative measure,\u201d he tells me. The city\u2019s canine population at least doubled. \u201cI think dogs are what got us through,\u201d says Brandow. The trade-off: There were now several hundred thousand pounds of fresh dog feces appearing on city surfaces, and there was no law requiring it to be picked up. This was in itself disgusting but also came to represent the city\u2019s problems. Attacking dog waste became an attack on blight. \u201cIf only we clean up the streets,\u201d says Brandow, paraphrasing the logic, \u201cwe wouldn\u2019t have an urban crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, what were you going to do about it \u2014 pick up your own dog\u2019s poop? City street cleaners had once picked up horse manure, so wasn\u2019t this their job? The idea of legally requiring a person to lean over and cradle feces was horrifying. \u201cThis is pet hysteria,\u201d lamented one activist. It didn\u2019t even make sense; how would you do it? \u201cLook, if you know anyone who has tried it,\u201d a founder of the Dog Owners\u2019 Guild of Brooklyn Heights once asked a reporter covering the matter, \u201cwould you ask them how they manage?\u201d Meanwhile, critics in the anti-dog camp, some of whom seemed to object to the very concept of urban dogs, argued the poop proposals did not go nearly far enough. Fran Lee, founder of the group Children Before Dogs, who insisted public pet feces posed a major public-health risk, proposed dogs ought to use their owners\u2019 bathrooms. \u201cThere literally was a war between pro-dog and anti-dog people in New York back then,\u201d Brandow says. In 1978, New York State finally passed the \u201cpooper-scooper law\u201d (more formally, New York State Public Health Law 1310) requiring owners in New York City to clean up after their dogs or face fines up to $100 (nearly $500 in 2026 dollars). There was some backlash. Eventually, most people did it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe poop-scoop law,\u201d Brandow says, \u201cmade dogs socially acceptable for the first time.\u201d They became strangely more like babies. There is not all that much difference, it turns out, between a dog-poop bag and a diaper; either way, it is an unseemly act of care. On its own, the law was unlikely to have transformed dogs\u2019 status from \u201cfamily pet\u201d to \u201cfamily,\u201d but it didn\u2019t need to.<\/p>\n

Through the 1970s, the country saw an increasingly diverse array of family structures that \u201cushered in the foundation for the emergence of the multi-species family,\u201d Laurent-Simpson argues in Just Like Family: How Companion Animals Joined the Household. Dogs were taking on \u201cfamilial identities,\u201d she writes, \u201cthat have historically been reserved for humans.\u201d Families catered to their dogs\u2019 tastes and preferences; their dogs had birthday parties and grandparents. In the backyards of suburbia, this might have been a mostly private evolution, but there is no privacy in the city.<\/p>\n

How many dogs are there in New York? Nobody knows for sure. There were about 100,000 licensed dogs as of 2024, but that accounts for only a small fraction of the canine population, which is mostly composed of scofflaws. (An annual dog license costs $8.50 for dogs that have been spayed or neutered.) The latest New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey, from 2023, found about 15 percent of households had at least one dog, a fraction of the national average, which, according to 2025\u2019s American Veterinary Medicine Pet Ownership and Demographics Sourcebook, was 42.6 percent. Still, the number that gets tossed around is about 600,000 \u2014 a lot of dogs.<\/p>\n

But is it more dogs? The overarching narrative is that New York is now doggier than ever, a product of the pandemic puppy boom, or gentrification<\/a>, or declining (human) birth rates, or the suburbanization of the city. \u201cThe athleisure and the dogs are taking over,\u201d lamented<\/a> Chlo\u00eb Sevigny to Rolling Stone in 2024, setting off several days of dog-population discussion. \u201cEverybody\u2019s in Lululemon and has a fucking dog and it\u2019s driving me crazy.\u201d (Sevigny\u2019s representative said she was unavailable to comment for this story.) Certainly, it seemed the population size had to be unprecedented. \u201cIt felt like everybody got a dog,\u201d says Luis Perez, who owns a dog day-care and grooming business in Hoboken. \u201cAnd if they had a dog, they got a second dog.\u201d<\/p>\n

The only complication is the numbers don\u2019t seem to add up. Dog adoptions here may actually have declined in 2020. \u201cThe pandemic pet boom,\u201d concluded<\/a> Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker, appeared \u201cmainly to be one of increasing attention.\u201d The same 600,000-dog estimate has been circulating for decades. I should think of it as a WAGNER number \u2014 \u201cwild-ass guess not easily refuted\u201d \u2014 advises Alan Beck, director of the city\u2019s Bureau of Animal Affairs in the poop-scoop era and now a professor emeritus at Purdue. But still, people seem to agree, they personally have never seen so many dogs. \u201cI am noticing more dogs in public,\u201d says City Councilmember Chi Oss\u00e9, who represents parts of Bed-Stuy and northern Crown Heights and has been vocal<\/a> about the post-blizzard dog-shit situation. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t think I want to comment about how I feel about that because I hope to have a long political career.\u201d<\/p>\n

But even if there aren\u2019t more dogs, the dogs we have certainly seem to be taking up more space. We are living in a moment of rampant lawlessness or, more charitably, renegotiation. \u201cPeople did not think about taking dogs to restaurants 30 years ago,\u201d recalls W magazine\u2019s Lynn Hirschberg, who is accompanied almost everywhere by a spaniel\u2013Border-collie mix. \u201cIt didn\u2019t happen.\u201d Now, dogs are on line at the city\u2019s coffee shops<\/a>, in carts at Trader Joe\u2019s<\/a>, seated at the movies<\/a>. \u201cI definitely take him in every place until I get kicked out,\u201d says Mackenzie Katz, a 32-year-old art handler and dance teacher in Chinatown, of his adopted 45-pound goldendoodle, Clover. \u201cI know it\u2019s a health concern in restaurants, I get it, but it\u2019s the forgiveness-versus-permission thing.\u201d He rarely needs forgiveness. Mostly, people just want to pet the dog. A few hours after we first spoke, Katz texted me a picture of himself and Clover on the Coney Island Wonder Wheel. \u201cMight be pushing the boundaries of negligence,\u201d he wrote. A caf\u00e9 owner in her early 40s tells me guiltily about the time she smuggled her terrier into the Dead Rabbit. \u201cI said he was a support animal when he\u2019s clearly not,\u201d she says, but he hates to be alone, and he barks, and \u2026 was it so bad? \u201cI understand we live in a giant city and we have to have rules, and that\u2019s what makes society society,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I do have a feeling sometimes I\u2019m just gonna make this one not apply to me. It\u2019s not fair or appropriate. But I\u2019m also like, He\u2019s ten pounds.\u201d<\/p>\n

For business owners, effective dog management lies somewhere between awkward and impossible. \u201cThose interactions rarely go positively,\u201d says Kip Gleize, a restaurateur whose current projects include the Brooklyn spots Margot and Montague Diner. Once, she stopped someone from bringing in their dog, then watched as they left, studied their phone, and then marched back. \u201cThey\u2019re like, \u2018Actually, it\u2019s a service dog, and you\u2019re not allowed to ask us for proof.\u2019\u201d Restaurants could theoretically be fined by the New York City Health Department, but it rarely happens. In city parks, the designated off-leash hours don\u2019t necessarily reflect unofficial norms. (Only while writing this story did I learn Prospect Park\u2019s off-leash hours do not begin folksily \u201cat dusk\u201d but rather quite officially \u201cat 9 p.m.\u201d) It is normal, if not \u201clegal,\u201d to see uncontained dogs on the MTA. (In 2025, just 13 summonses were issued for \u201cunauthorized animals\u201d riding the subway, and the Department of Sanitation issued only two for uncollected dog waste.) \u201cWe\u2019re brainstorming,\u201d Oss\u00e9 tells me of a possible policy solution. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to craft it in a way that isn\u2019t too Big Brother. We don\u2019t want to completely turn New York City into a police state just because of dog shit on the streets.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you see one dog on the subway, it\u2019s like, What are you doing?\u200a\u201d says Sherman Ewing, who founded his dog-walking business, Club Pet NYC, in the early \u201990s and has been immersed ever since. \u201cBut if all of a sudden everybody\u2019s bringing them, then you don\u2019t really know what the rule is.\u201d Until recently, jaywalking was against the rules too, and everyone did that. \u201cIt\u2019s not like I\u2019m going to take her somewhere where I would automatically realize it wouldn\u2019t be a good idea,\u201d Hirschberg says of Zora, who was trained as a service dog but is not, strictly speaking, Hirschberg\u2019s service dog.<\/p>\n

Many people are following the rules: Restaurants are not filled with Labradoodles and it is mostly possible to navigate the streets. When people break the rules, it is usually fine. \u201cI\u2019ve never really seen a dog disrupt anyone\u2019s service before,\u201d says Sarah Morrissey, beverage director at Golden Age Hospitality and general manager at ACME and the Nines. She is an unequivocal fan of dogs in restaurants. \u201cI will turn into a 5-year-old. I\u2019m like, Oh my God, there\u2019s a dog here! I\u2019m going to stop everything and pet it.\u201d (Once, a dog peed on the floor, \u201cbut it was really little, and we cleaned it up quickly.\u201d Also, there was the time she had to intervene about a yappy German-shepherd puppy, but that\u2019s it.) Yet even she understands the simmering dog-related rage.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not about whether people are following the rules,\u201d says an exasperated Brooklyn lawyer when discussing the doggy state of Fort Greene Park. \u201cEven if everyone is following the rules, there are just too many fucking people with dogs.\u201d It surprised him to feel this way; until moving nearby, he\u2019d considered himself \u201ca dog boy.\u201d But now what he sees are \u201call these really rich white people taking over the one green space that\u2019s close by and having their big dogs shit all over it.\u201d It felt emblematic: a historically Black neighborhood being obliviously, carelessly consumed by richer, whiter newcomers with their Trader Joe\u2019s totes and their rescued Australian shepherds. He is also white and has no deep claim on the area (\u201cI don\u2019t even know if I have any entitlement to feel put off by other people\u2019s sense of entitlement!\u201d), but at least he thinks about it. \u201cThere\u2019s something that feels particularly creepy and off-putting about it given the racial and socioeconomic context,\u201d he says. While dog ownership cuts across demographic lines, it isn\u2019t evenly distributed. On a population level, there are racial differences: Nationally, about two-thirds of white and Hispanic adults have a pet, according to the 2023 Pew data. For Black and Asian American adults, it hovers just above a third. And though dogs don\u2019t require ultrawealth, specific types of dogs can represent a changing landscape. \u201cAs housing prices rise in an area,\u201d the New York Times reported a few years ago, \u201cdog breeds tend to skew smaller and more expensive.\u201d Every new luxury <\/a>development seemed to advertise a dog spa. Asad Dandia, a local historian and city tour guide who grew up in Brooklyn, says it has become a running joke among his friends: \u201cYou know you\u2019re about to get kicked out of the neighborhood when you see a dog park getting built or a dog spa or a doggy day care.\u201d We were walking along Atlantic Avenue when he said this. Within seconds, we had stumbled upon a doggy day care and \u201cautomated self-wash \u2018spaw\u2019\u201d called Doggittude. I asked him what else he might consider a harbinger of yuppification.<\/p>\n

\u201cCertain venture-capital-owned caf\u00e9s.\u201d<\/p>\n

I thought of a story Karl Steel, a CUNY medievalist, told me about a 13th-century French nobleman who apparently delighted in terrorizing the countryside with what he claimed was his pet wolf, a classic case of a rich and powerful person behaving with impunity. \u201cI will say, very satisfyingly, he was killed in a revolt of his social and political inferiors.\u201d He paused. \u201cProbably some of the dynamics in the neighborhood are around that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not everyone is afraid of being eaten, though that is one valid reason to dislike dogs. There are people who are afraid, based on instinct or experience, and people who are allergic; people who cannot tolerate the crotch sniffing; people who simply believe that dogs, regardless of their position in the family, should not encroach on indoor space. There are people who find dogs gross \u2014 the health risk posed by dogs in restaurants is low but not zero \u2014 and people whose grievance isn\u2019t with the dogs per se but with the owners who willfully ignore the ways their furry beasts impose upon the world. Bobby Fijan, co-founder of the American Housing Corporation, a start-up developing family-friendly urban real estate, tells me this was his concern. He does not hate dogs; he personally has a dog. But we have to acknowledge there are costs, such as park maintenance and sanitation, and while he didn\u2019t have an estimate, he says, \u201cwe should have a fair reckoning \u2014 they exist.\u201d On X, I\u2019d seen him hinting at something like a dog tax<\/a>, but on the phone, Fijan, who lives in Texas, seemed careful not to use those terms. Once the costs had been calculated, we could \u201cwork backward on the fees,\u201d which was also the way he thought about cars: Cities weren\u2019t built for cars, yet they\u2019re everywhere. It makes sense. But most people don\u2019t think of cars as family.<\/p>\n

A few weeks later, I sat at VC-backed Blank Street, writing emails and counting dogs. There had been 13 of them, five of which were doodles. \u201cIt\u2019s so good to see you, sweetheart,\u201d a barista squealed, rubbing the belly of a small silken-haired regular in a green puffer. \u201cYou\u2019re so little!\u201d I watched a fluffy black dog shaped like an ottoman and a pair of what I diagnosed as Maltipoos. With the exception of the barky ottoman, the dogs all struck me as quite self-possessed. During this time, I also observed two babies.<\/p>\n

The caf\u00e9 owner with the terrier told me she\u2019d just the other day gone to a fancy French bakery and followed the rules and gone to significant lengths to leave her dog outside. \u201cAnd then there\u2019s a woman with her giant baby stroller in there FaceTiming with someone while she\u2019s taking up this enormous amount of space,\u201d she recalled. \u201cTo me, that is frustrating. Like, my dog is the thing I\u2019m most responsible for in this life. And yet I have to leave him outside, and meanwhile this person is taking up all this space and being obnoxious about it?\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost immediately, I heard a version of the story in reverse, only now it was from a dogless Clinton Hill attorney with a baby. She\u2019d been trying to maneuver her stroller into a store, only to find the entrance blocked by a woman with a dog, who did not, in her estimation, seem interested in either helping or moving. \u201cI just had this sense of, Wow, this woman truly thinks of this dog as more important in this moment than this baby and my ability to enter this building,\u201d she said. Why could these people who managed to marshal so much empathy for dogs, she wondered, not do the same for human beings?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a line of thinking that insists people are channeling their love to French bulldogs with breathing problems instead of having the children who would carry on civilization, so perhaps dogs have become a symbol of the collapse of \u201cfamily values\u201d? I floated this by Katherine C. Grier, a social historian who has spent much of her career focused on the relationships between Americans and their pets. \u201cOh, this goes back to the 16th century!\u201d she said. \u201cThere would be these scurrilous things written about aristocratic women who had lapdogs \u2014 that they love their dogs more than their children, or they\u2019re using their dog as a child.\u201d To drive home this point, they might take it to its logical extension: She was so depraved she\u2019d allow the dog to nurse at her breast.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese kinds of discourses, they rise, they fall, they rise, they fall,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s like there can only be so many themes.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a chilly weekday morning at the end of March, I strolled through Fort Greene Park. The dogs had another 45 minutes of relative freedom before they\u2019d be back on their leashes, returning to their apartments. I watched a gallivanting Old English sheepdog with an exquisite man-bun, assorted walking pom-poms, a swarm of Shih Tzus, and several loping hounds. I stared at a contemplative Chihuahua as it stared into the void. For a weekday morning, the park was not especially crowded, yet there were an astounding number of dogs. \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d a friend mused, as we watched her Jack Russell mix mouthing a tennis ball. \u201cIt\u2019s so joyful. How can it not lift your spirits?\u201d<\/p>\n

The difficulty of dogs is exactly what makes them so appealing: They are deeply foreign, and they are, at the same time, just like us. They are family, and they are unknowable. New York is clearly not built for them, but the city\u2019s expansive flexibility has always been a selling point. \u201cI feel like having a dog in the city is pushing the boundaries a bit,\u201d says Katz, the Chinatown art handler. \u201cBut living in the city as a human is also pushing the boundaries.\u201d<\/p>\n

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