You’ve been doing the second half.
There are two steps, and they go in an order. First you curb the dog — take it to the curb, or at least out of the path of the people using the sidewalk. Then you bag what it leaves. Almost everyone in this city does the second one faithfully and has never heard of the first.
Curb, then bag
“Curb your dog” has drifted into meaning “pick up after your dog.” It never meant that. It comes from a signage campaign that began in New York in the 1930s and told owners to bring the animal to the gutter at the edge of the street instead of letting it use the sidewalk.[4] Picking up came later, in 1978, from a completely different law that says nothing about curbs.[3][5]
1 First — mostly skipped
Curb it
Get the dog off the walking surface before it goes. The curb and the gutter are what the phrase is actually about. Short of that: anywhere that isn’t the path people use, or the door they walk through, or the thing they have to put a hand on.
This is the half that goes missing.
2 Second — widely done
Bag it
New York Public Health Law § 1310 requires the owner to remove any feces the dog leaves on a sidewalk, gutter, street or other public area. The penalty runs to $250, and service dogs are exempt.[3]
You carry the bags. You always have.
The part nobody reads
Step one isn’t only good manners. There is a live New York City rule about it, and it has been on the books the whole time.
“A person who owns, possesses or controls a dog, cat or other animal shall not permit the animal to commit a nuisance on a sidewalk of any public place, on a floor, wall, stairway or roof of any public or private premises used in common by the public, or on a fence, wall or stairway of a building abutting on a public place.”[1]
There is no bag in that sentence and no cleanup in it. It is about where the thing happens, and the list of wheres is long: the sidewalk, the shared floor, the wall, the stairway of a building on a public street.
Which leaves the obvious question — what counts as a nuisance? The Health Code answers that one section earlier, and the answer is wider than most owners assume.
“Animal nuisances shall include, but not be limited to, animal feces, urine, blood, body parts, carcasses, vomitus and pervasive odors…”[2]
Urine is named in the text. So the rule nobody has heard of is the one covering the thing your dog does eight times a walk, in all the places you’d decided were fine.
How one phrase ate the other
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01
The signs came down
The curbing campaign ran from the 1930s into the late 1970s and then stopped. The phrase stayed in circulation long after the instruction it referred to was posted anywhere.[4]
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02
A newer law took the name
When the 1978 waste law arrived, people attached the older, catchier phrase to the newer, better-publicized rule. Two obligations collapsed into one remembered slogan.[5]
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03
The coverage does it too
In 2022, reporting on the Sanitation Department’s own curbing-enforcement push described the pickup requirement as “the city’s ‘Curb Your Dog’ law, which was passed back in 1978” — merging the campaign and the statute in one clause.[6][4]
So: curb it, then bag it
Bagging satisfies a state law from 1978. It does not address where the dog went, and it does nothing at all about urine — which the Health Code names by hand and which nobody is picking up after.
The order matters because the second step can’t fix the first. A bag collects what’s on the sidewalk. It doesn’t move the dog off it.
Not a rule — just a decent thing to do
Bring a bottle of water
Urine doesn’t go anywhere. It sits on the concrete, works away at whatever it landed on, and on a hot day it comes back up as smell for every person walking past. If your dog goes somewhere a hand or a foot is going to land — a stoop, a doorway, a hydrant, a bike rack, the middle of the sidewalk — a squeeze bottle carried on the walk will rinse most of it into the gutter.
Three seconds. Costs nothing. Bring the bottle.
From here: what curbing meant and how the phrase got lost; what is actually behind the trash can, the hydrant and the grate; and the doorway, which is the worst of them. The city argues about this constantly — see what’s in the news, and note what the argument is always about. Every claim here is sourced.