A manicured downtown park has become a battleground between dog owners and residents who say their favorite walking area has become a giant toilet.
Dog-walkers routinely ignore the Parks Department “No Dogs Allowed” signs at DeLury Square park and let their pets relieve themselves.
“You’ve got beautiful flowers in here,” said Ione Munk, a 40-year resident of Southbridge Towers, which looms over the park at Gold and Fulton streets. “The dogs doing their business in there is not good. It’s killing them.”
But dog owners were outraged when Community Board 1 passed a resolution Wednesday supporting an effort by a group, Friends of DeLury Park, to keep the canines out.
“What, is this a police state all of a sudden?” asked Krista Martino, as she walked her male, 4-year-old Pomeranian, Foxy Brown. “These people have nothing better to do?”
She said she was walking her dog in the 8,800-square-foot park yesterday when a woman snapped at her, “Don’t walk your dog in here!”
“I told her, ‘Mind your own business,’ ” said Martino, 60.
“What are we supposed to do?” she asked. “Hang [our dogs] out the window so they can pee and poop? Put them in diapers?”
Jonathan Herzog, walking his 3-year-old male English pointer, Memphis, called the proposed crackdown “just disgusting.”
“This park belongs to everyone,” said Herzog, 51, an attorney who lives in the area. “This is an amenity we all pay for . . . This is a public park.”
The poop debate has escalated into angry confrontations in the elegant, 3-year-old park, which features a waterfall.
Herzog recalled how a woman yelled at him when he walked Memphis. “She’s screaming at me, telling me she’s going to have me arrested,” he said.
Munk said it’s not the dogs but the dog owners who have to be trained.
“They should be curbing their dogs,” she said. “They should be carrying bottles of water with them and washing it down” after their pets urinate.
Herzog said, “We all have to learn to be able to live with each other. That’s city life. If you don’t like it, move to the suburbs.”
Martino had a different suggestion for the critics: Chill out.
“Maybe they should get dogs,” she said, “and they wouldn’t be so unhappy.”