Tribeca Dog Run Unleashed

The City’s Department of Parks and Recreation has taken control over a Tribeca dog park, after more than a decade during which the agency appears to have been unaware of the facility’s existence, or the fact that it bore responsibility for it.

The 4,000-square-foot dog park, located on Warren Street, between West and Greenwich Streets, has for years been maintained and operated by a non-profit community group, Dog Owners of Tribeca (DOOT), which was formed in response to the Parks Department’s lack of interest in managing the facility.

To fund activities like power washing the dog park multiple times each week, DOOT charged members a monthly fee of $10, which raised in excess of $50,000 a year. In an effort to enforce standards of behavior (such as requiring owners to clean up after their dogs), DOOT also installed a gate at the facility’s entrance, where access was controlled by an electronic combination lock. Members of DOOT were given the passcode, but the facility was effectively closed to everyone else.

In the wake of a Broadsheet story about the Parks Department’s unwillingness to take responsibility for the dog run, published in April, DOOT’s board of directors wrote that, “last week, after years of absenteeism and apathy, the Parks Department demanded that we immediately dismantle our existing membership-based program and take the keycode off the park’s door, while simultaneously refusing, at least initially, to bear any responsibility for the expenses or maintenance relating to the park moving forward.”

“As stewards for the park, we pushed back and refused to do so unless Parks affirmatively accepts responsibility for the insurance, and expenses relating to services even as basic as garbage removal and maintenance,” DOOT’s board told the Broadsheet.

The Parks Department eventually acceded to these demands, but added a demand of its own: That DOOT, “remove all of the benches and pools in the park because they were not Parks Department-issued, without necessarily planning on replacing them,” according to the organization’s board.

Last Friday, the Parks Department took control of the facility, by removing the lock that DOOT had placed in the gate. But it has yet to announce any plans (or funding) to maintain the dog park in the manner that the Tribeca group has for years.

Complicating matters is that the park itself is in urgent need of major capital repairs. As Bob Townley, executive director of Manhattan Youth (which operates the Downtown Community Center, directly adjacent to the dog park) explained at a March 20 meeting of Community Board 1, “the dog run has collapsed a few years ago, because it was never built right. There’s no drainage, because it wasn’t filled in properly. I’m afraid someday there’s going to be a sinkhole there.”

“And the Parks Department didn’t even know that they owned,” the southern half of the lot on which the dog run is located, Mr. Townley noted. This prompted Mr. Townley to begin calling that agency more than 12 months ago, to push for repairs at the dog run similar to those completed by the Department of Education in the adjacent, northern half of the lot (which serves as a playground for the nearby P.S. 234) several years earlier.

No schedule has yet been announced for repairs to the subsurface of the dog run. The belated realization by the Parks Department that the ground beneath the Warren Street dog run may need shoring up comes against the backdrop of an ongoing lawsuit (filed in 2016), in which the City is seeking damages from the developer and construction contractor who erected the 200 Chambers condominium building, which opened in 2007, claiming that sub-standard construction methods have caused subsidence at both the playground and the dog run.

“No one wants repairs to the sinkhole in the park more than our organization does,” the DOOT directors respond,  but we are skeptical about the Parks Department’s ability to achieve this repair given their history with the property. In light of their reluctance to provide even basic services for the Warren Street Dog Park moving forward, it would be naive to think that they will now achieve a million-dollar-plus repair with any expediency.”

The organization’s directors add that, “ultimately, we are amenable to the Parks Department’s newfound interest in taking over responsibility for the park, but the keyword here is ‘responsibility.’ What we cannot accept, however, is a scenario where the Parks Department strips the park down to nothing, as they’re suggesting doing, and leaving nothing in it’s wake.”