Poisoned Promenade

From a dog's point of view, the long, wide Manhattan boulevard which humans have named Park Avenue and enthusiasts call the world's finest residential street, is not the place it used to be. The change dates about from the time when the policeman at 39th Street berated old Miss Wendel, the recluse who lived with her maiden sisters in the big brick house on Fifth Avenue, for bringing her elderly poodle over to Park Avenue for airings when she had a perfectly good yard of her own in which it could run, sniff and so on.

Soon after that, the exciting, smell-laden strip of turf and shrubbery in the middle of the avenue began to be narrowed. And policemen grew stricter about letting dogs go inside the iron fences. At the same time the sidewalks were narrowed too. Since telephone poles long ago disappeared from Park Avenue and the slim trees are boarded up, a dog's life was no fun at all during the months when hydrants and lamp posts were made inaccessible by excavations.

Narrowing of the sidewalks, necessitated by the increasing rush of dog-scaring motor traffic, has caused intelligent dogs to prefer the inner side of the walk. The walls of apartment houses are uninviting, it is true, but life is sweeter than freedom. Yet last week came news that not even apartment house walls are safe, that a dog's life between 70th and 85th Streets, not only on Park Avenue but on lowly Madison and lowlier Lexington, may be in danger at every sniff. To discourage dogs from smelling at doors and house corners, people have been sprinkling nose-outraging powders. Evidently some of this powder has contained arsenic. Several dogs have been sick. One dog died in convulsions.

Below 70th Street, where promenade Mrs. Rupert Hughes's Jinka (Pekinese), John Held Jr.'s Madame (dachshund), Mrs. Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte's Tobie of Meridale (Pekinese), and their friends, anxiety reigned last week. Above 70th, where Mrs. August Belmont's Lillium von der Til Til (German Police) is but one aristocrat among many, reigned positive consternation. Small comfort, indeed little short of insult, was it for the authorities to assert that no properly muzzled dog need fear for its life.

To end the terror and apprehend all miscreant canicides, detectives and S. P. C. A. agents were being sent out last week early at morning and late at night.

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