A new short documentary wades into the dog-versus-stroller turf battle at a Queens playground — and finds a neighborhood fight that says a lot about who the city is actually built for.
By the time most of Astoria is pouring its first coffee, Sean’s Place has already emptied out. From roughly seven to nine in the morning, the mixed-use basketball and handball court tucked into the neighborhood functions as something it was never zoned to be: a dog park. Boston terriers, mutts of indeterminate lineage, the occasional overconfident pit, they arrive off-leash, burn off what they need to burn off, and clear out before the first kid shows up with a scooter. It’s a gentleman’s agreement nobody signed. It’s also, technically, illegal.
This is the setting of For The Dogs, a short documentary by Collin Kornfeind arriving this spring, and if you live anywhere in New York where a patch of green has ever been contested — which is to say, anywhere in New York — you already know the broad shape of the story before the first frame rolls. You just may not have known there was a name for the front line.
Photo: Collin Kornfeind
Kornfeind lives five minutes from Sean’s Place with his wife and a three-and-a-half-year-old Boston terrier named Waffle. He is, by his own admission, new to this. “Owning a dog for the first time in my life, I quickly became immersed in the ethical, political, and sanitary world of dog-friendly spaces and the lack thereof throughout New York City,” he says. The nearest legal dog park from his apartment is a 25-minute walk each way, an hour-plus out of a working person’s day so a small animal can sprint in circles for ten minutes. The math does not math. And so Astorians, like dog owners across the five boroughs, have quietly improvised.
Photo: For The Dogs, by Collin Kornfeind (Meaningless Films)
The numbers Kornfeind dug up while noodling around with the idea are the kind of numbers that sound made up and aren’t. Roughly 150 dog parks and dog-friendly green spaces. Roughly 600,000 dogs. That’s one dog park for every 4,000 animals. Then it gets worse: the Parks Department doesn’t actually run the dog parks. Every single one is community-fundraised, community-organized, and community-maintained, in a city where “community” is a word that changes hands every eighteen months with the lease. Getting a new space approved takes, give or take, three years of community-board purgatory.
What pushed the subject from griping-over-beers territory into a film was a conversation with Kornfeind’s longtime collaborator Matthew Waysdorf, who has two kids and therefore sees the other side of the court. Waysdorf told him about the Reddit threads, the Saturday-morning horror stories, the parents describing their children finding dog waste at the bottom of the slide. “It was a cold war,” Kornfeind says, “and it was happening all around me.”
Photo: For The Dogs, by Collin Kornfeind (Meaningless Films)
That phrase — cold war — is the key to why For The Dogs works as something other than a local-news segment. Both sides have a case. Both sides are, on some level, trying to do right by a small creature they love. The dog owners aren’t monsters; they’re people whose city has decided their pet’s exercise is a private problem. The parents aren’t scolds; they’re people whose kid’s playground keeps turning into a dog run at dawn. The villain, if there is one, isn’t on camera. It’s the allocation spreadsheet.
Kornfeind shot the whole thing in a day, with a pickup day arranged around the schedule of his city councilmember, Tiffany Cabán, who agreed to sit for an interview. Every conversation was shot on a 12mm lens at a fixed distance, a choice he’s pretty clear about. “I wanted the film to be primarily about space,” he says. “In New York City, space is at a premium and the framing of the film had to reflect people within its precious confines.” Subjects are planted inside the park, boxed in by the geometry that started the fight in the first place. You feel the square footage.
Photo: For The Dogs, by Collin Kornfeind (Meaningless Films)
He resists the documentary filmmaker’s worst instinct, which is to pick a team. No gotchas. No sneering cutaways. Asked point-blank whether making the film left him more pro-dog or more pro-parent, he won’t bite. The point isn’t to hand out a verdict; it’s to get the two sides to acknowledge they’re fighting over the same shortage.
The title, for the record, is in quotes on purpose — a wink. The people hauling their dogs to Sean’s Place at 7 a.m. are there for the dogs, sure. They’re also there for each other. That’s what happens when a city quietly offloads a public good onto its residents: the residents build a parallel civic life in the cracks, usually around coffee, usually before work, usually somewhere they’re not supposed to be.
For The Dogs premieres this spring.