The specifics
The filth you’re not thinking about
This is not squeamishness. Every object on this page is one that somebody has to touch — by hand, as part of a job, usually early in the morning. What follows is what each of them actually is.
The reason “anywhere but the sidewalk” isn’t good enough is that the sidewalk is furnished. It has equipment on it, and the equipment belongs to somebody, and that somebody comes back for it.
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The trash can
A city litter basket is not emptied by machine. Somebody walks up to it, takes hold of it, and hauls the bag out — with hands, at chest height, at the exact level a dog aims for. The basket is then carried, tipped and set back down.
Nobody in that sequence consented to your dog’s contribution, and nobody in it is the dog’s owner.
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The hydrant
Hydrants are not decorative bollards. They are inspected, flow-tested and, in the worst hours of somebody’s life, opened by hand under pressure by a firefighter who is not thinking about what has been on it.
The cartoon has done real damage here. There is nothing about a hydrant that makes it the designated one.
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The grate
The gratings set into New York sidewalks are not drains and not decoration. Con Edison’s own specification is plain about it: “The gratings provide ventilation for the transformer as well as a means of entry for Con Edison personnel to maintain, remove, or install equipment.”[9]
Ventilation — so it goes down into the vault. Entry — so a person climbs through it.
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The tree pit
The popular defense is that a tree pit is soil, so it must be fine. What kills the grass is nitrogen: “Spots of dead grass are common in areas where dogs have urinated, and it is due to the urine’s nitrogen content.”[8]
And not, as almost everyone believes, acidity — “there is no relationship between the urine pH and nitrogen content.”[8]
The one that isn’t a nuisance
Everything above is a question of decency and somebody else’s working day. This one is different in kind, and it is the reason to take the grate seriously rather than laugh at it.
Contact voltage — “stray voltage” — happens when deteriorated insulation on underground cables energizes metal at street level: a grate, a manhole cover, the base of a lamppost. Road salt and water accelerate the decay that causes it. A urine stream is salt water, delivered by an animal standing on the metal in question.[10]
This is not hypothetical in this city. Jodie Lane was electrocuted by an energized metal plate while walking her dogs in the East Village in January 2004. Local Law 44 of 2004 followed, and Con Edison’s equipment has been surveyed for contact voltage since.[10]
Which turns the whole argument around. Curbing is not only a courtesy you extend to the person emptying the basket. On a wet January night it is a thing you do for your own dog.
And the one with its own page
The building entrance belongs on this list and is the worst of them, because it is the only one every resident is obliged to walk across. It has a page of its own.
Not a rule — just a decent thing to do
The bottle, again
None of the above needs a campaign. It needs the dog taken four more steps, and on the occasions when that doesn’t happen, a few seconds of water aimed toward the gutter. The person who empties the basket will never know you did it, which is rather the point.
The through-line
A sidewalk looks like a surface. It is closer to a machine — ventilation for the grid below it, water supply for the fire service, waste collection, street trees kept alive by hand — and all of it maintained by people who arrive after you have gone.
The curb is the one edge of it that was built to be rinsed by the street and swept by a machine. That is not sentiment about a granite curbstone. It is the only part of the design that was ever meant to take this.