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This Tribeca Dog Is A Tree's Best Friend
Fred is a charismatic 10-year-old Staffordshire terrier with a penchant for carrying things in his jaws, including his human companion’s purse and the occasional bag of groceries from Chinatown. And recently, Fred became the face of a new Downtown campaign to stop dogs from urinating on trees. Fred, along with longtime Duane Street resident Gail Swithenbank, an architect, and her friend Michael Hall, an art dealer, began blitzing Tribeca last month, placing signs on posts near some 100 of the neighborhood’s trees. The campaign started after Hall had watched the London plane trees in his Upper West Side neighborhood die, one after the other. The culprit, he thought, was the constant procession of dogs and their corrosive urine. Putting a stop to it is especially important now, they say, since the initiation of MillionTreesNYC, Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to plant a million new trees in New York City.
The ammonia and urea in urine can eat right through the bark of a tree, gradually causing damage that makes the tree more susceptible to disease. And each time a dog marks a tree, it invites another visit. “If it’s one cocker spaniel, it leaves a few teaspoons,” said Hall. “But then the next visitor could be a Great Dane or a Newfoundland! And if that happens, say, 50 times a day it does a lot of damage.” Friends of Greenwich Street president Steve Boyce, who leads a campaign to add trees to Tribeca and protect those already planted, said that Swithenbank and Hall are on target and that dog urine is definately one of a multiple of factors that could kill a tree. “Street trees aren’t like forest trees; they’re like giant potted plants,” Boyce said. “If there’s anything that’s going on that’s stressing that tree, urine is going to make it a lot worse.” At first, Swithenbank and Hall posted laminated signs near street trees that simply read: “Be kind to city trees—they have a hard life. Dog urine kills trees.” “And then we realized that the response was more ‘Oh, you just hate dogs,’” said Swithenbank. She looked down lovingly at Fred. “Well, obviously that’s not the case.” A photo of Fred holding a sign in his mouth now adorns the posters, as does the logo from TreesNY, an organization dedicated to urban trees. One sunny day last month, the trio approached a blooming Bradford pear on the corner of Broadway and Worth. As they attached a sign to a nearby metal post, a man pushing a mail cart stopped to stare at Fred and the bag in his mouth. Then he read the sign. “Excuse me, can I have one of those?” he said. “To put up in my neighborhood in the Bronx?” Hall handed him a sign and the man took one last look at Fred, shook his head and laughed, and headed off down the street.
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