No parking zone: Fairmount's dog owners are locked out for now.

Going to the Dogs

Good thing these people aren't gun owners.

by Liz Spikol

Last week someone emailed me a video of a CBS News segment about Philadelphia homicides. A reporter went to North Philly and talked to a community activist, who was understandably pissed off. He then talked to Sylvester Johnson, who seemed both hopeless and disaffected. Once again I thought the three words I always think when people kill each other or the Phillies lose: “My poor city.”

How embarrassing. “My poor city.” What a pompous loser. Yet I feel the city’s pain. I suffer over it.

My psychiatrist explained to me recently that I’m an absorber. Other people’s feelings adhere to me. I’m like tape. Sadness, pain, shame—if it’s happening to someone else and I get wind of it, it’s happening to me too.

Being an absorber (which sort of sounds like being a diaper) makes me overly dramatic about Philadelphia. I’m like Edith Piaf: short, disturbed, and weeping as I sing “La 215 en Rose.”

But not all is murder and mayhem. In Fairmount, on streets abutting Eastern State Penitentiary, there’s a different kind of war being fought. I found out about it from Rachel Crowl, formerly of PW, who sent me a photo of her dog standing, forlorn, in front of a closed neighborhood dog park.

I immediately absorbed. Suddenly it was me standing outside the park, a leash tight and itchy around my neck, desperate to go to the one place that felt like freedom. I felt sticky with the injustice of it all. “Why?” I screamed inside my weimaraner self.

As a former dog owner, I know that if your dog isn’t tiny and neurotic, as all of mine have been, it’s a pleasure for them to run around and play with other dogs. So why the closure?

Deep breath: Some people liked the dog park, and some people called it a nuisance, and no one could agree for years—yes, years. So finally the people who didn’t like it filed a lawsuit and temporarily won, but the people who did like it have a lawyer, and it’s going back to court. In the meantime the dog owners are having a protest, and the doggie dissenters say they’re fighting “a defensive war,” and people are angry at each other, and the dogs have no idea what the hell is going on.

Neither do I.

So I looked at the related thread on PhillyBlog.com. And my powers to empathize, to absorb, deserted me. The thread was like kryptonite.

Apparently, these ostensibly reasonable people—mild-mannered dog owners in favor of a dog park, and mild-mannered neighbors sick of hearing dogs bark—include a subset of people who, when provoked, go completely insane.

The first thing I noticed was the vitriol directed against Ralph Cipriano, the plaintiff in the original suit to close the dog park. This being Philadelphia, I know Cipriano. He’s written for PW.

The posts about him slam him for being “a failure” because he got “fired” from the Inquirer. That’s when my anti-absorption Spidey sense started tingling.

Saying merely that Cipriano got fired is a willful misunderstanding of his case. In fact, the Inquirer was ultimately forced to issue a public apology and settle Cipriano’s libel case against them for an undisclosed sum that was posh enough that he could subsequently freelance for alt-weeklies. Do a Google search for “Cipriano” and “Inquirer,” and you’ll see how easily the full story is gleaned.

There are also allegations that Cipriano has a network of spies, and is having people followed. One poster, Bill Z, says Cipriano “makes me embarrassed to be Italian,” and requests a digital photo of Cipriano along with his address so “I can give this loser the publicity he deserves.”

Referring to the followers Cipriano supposedly enlisted, Buttercup10 writes: “Im pretty sure, but don’t quote me on this [too late], that these people are using this experience as a practice run for the beginning of their careers as lookouts and runners for drug dealers who will soon be doing business in the dog park.”

So Cipriano is starting a drug-dealing ring? It’s too much.

I called Cipriano, who says yes, he filed the lawsuit, and yes, he thinks it’s justified, though he also thinks it’s all pretty silly. As for the allegations against him, he claims he’s being harassed—that someone left a pile of dog poo on his porch, people are having dogs piss on his steps, and dog parkers are calling him and his wife Nazis.

The dog parkers say someone on the opposing side took a crowbar to the benches at the dog park, so that even if the dog walkers wanted to break the law and go around the police tape, there’d be nowhere for them to sit.

I hope nobody’s packing over there in Francisville.

Eric Diaz, a real estate lawyer whose firm Ballard Spahr is representing the dog park side pro bono, gave me a thorough history of the park and this dispute. As president of the nonprofit that runs the dog park, he says he’s been struggling for years to get this resolved—all unpaid, as a volunteer. He says there were years of collaboration and goodwill, and the people who filed the lawsuit interrupted a process that had potential.

Diaz doesn’t sound nuts. Cipriano doesn’t sound nuts. Rachel Crowl and her weimaraner—both sane. But this issue has assumed massive proportions in the neighborhood, and people have lost perspective. Perhaps Buttercup10 says it best: “With over 200 MURDERS don’t you think there is something BIGGER OUT THERE???”

Absorb that, my friends. I certainly have.

>> The latest development: Judge Gary Divito has ordered the Corinthian Avenue side of the dog park closed and sealed. Friends of Eastern State Penitentiary Park is appealing the judgment.

>> Best recent PhillyBlog comment by a nobleman: “Does anything else happen in Fairmount? Is everyone obsessed with dogs?” asks Count Funkula.

>> Other off-leash dog parks in Philly: Orianna Hill (Poplar and Widley), Chester Avenue (48th and Chester) and Seger Dog Park (11th Street between Lombard and South).

>> Largest dog park in the city: Fairmount Park.