Accidental Tourist

Getting down with the dogs in New York City

Looking down into the friendly faces of NYC's Boston terriers and French bulldogs is a unique way to experience the delights of the city, writes Karen Rutter

25 November 2018 - 00:00 By Karen Rutter

Forget your feet - when you walk in New York, your neck gets the hardest workout.
"Skyscraper National Park" is what Kurt Vonnegut called the city, because when you get there you're just as vertically mesmerised as a tourist seeing their first giraffe in Kruger.
The Empire State monolith, the gracious Chrysler spire, Frank Gehry's latest fantasy, Zaha Hadid's High Line zeitgeist - it's all up.
Cruising Manhattan's streets, dodging cabs and garbage trucks, one cranes to catch a glimpse into the exclusive apartments circling Central Park and floating above Fifth Avenue. You just know that's where Trevor Noah is sipping a sundowner on his roof garden, and where LP is busy shooting her latest music vid.
But, as we found on a recent trip, there is another way to discover the delights of the city, and that is looking down - into the friendly, smiley faces of New York City's Boston terriers and French bulldogs.
See, we've got a Boston of our own - the highly adorable, lethally flatulent Beatrix. And she was at home in Cape Town, and we were missing her. So imagine our joy when we saw the unmistakeable derrière-waddle of a Boston sashaying down 42nd Street. Attached to a human, of course. We were hesitant to dive in, though - I mean, what kind of deviant just walks up and starts making hooshy-cooshy noises at your hound?
We needn't have worried. Lola, for that was her name, turned out to be a gateway dog, leading to a week of ever-heightened canine fixes. And the New Yorkers on the other end of the leashes were only too happy to deal. It was a win-win situation - the pooches got patted, the owners felt proud, and we got to talk to genuine New Yorkers in a way that was different to saying thank you for a subway ticket, or ordering a beer.
"Oh, so your Vanilla also snores very loudly!" we'd exclaim, and swap tips about noise-cancelling headphones while skateboarders slewed around us on Washington Square. Down in the Meatpacking District, dodging a drag queen draped around a lamppost, a couple told us: "Simon's getting on now, but he's still sprightly, and he gets us out of the apartment."
A professional dog walker told us Roosevelt was fundamentally lazy, while he sat on a sidewalk in Soho and refused to take another step. "His owners live in a 10th floor apartment, and they carry him everywhere. I'm supposed to exercise him, but he's just not that into it. I don't like forcing him," she confided.
We had a code, as it were - only Bostons and their equally squat cousins, French bulldogs, were part of Operation Oompa-Loompa. Their stubby silhouettes were as iconic to us as the sleek New York skyline to travel brochures, and we got a bit obsessed with spotting them.
If a GPS tracker had been fixed to my backpack it would have looked crazy - one minute we'd be heading in a clear line to the Moma, next thing there'd be an erratic jerk across W53rd Street. The destination - a white Frenchy puppy named Piper, sitting in a handbag at a coffee shop - wouldn't come up on any normal Google map, but we'd have found another part of New York that was special to us.
Look, it's not like we didn't do the city. We cycled Central Park, we went to the Met, we saw the Statue of Liberty and the Guggenheim.
But we also have another set of memories. "Ooh, Brooklyn," we'll say, flicking through our phone pics. "That's where we met Appleby. Remember, he liked pretzels?" The secret was in looking down. • Do you have a funny or quirky story about your travels? Send 600 words to travelmag@sundaytimes.co.za and include a recent photograph of yourself for publication with the column...

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