What do Rich New Yorkers Name their Dogs?

And other canine curiosities of the city

New York City has a data portal which includes a dataset containing the name, zip code, and registration date for all¹ of the dogs in the city. It looks like this:

It’s fun. Analyzing it, we can see things like the most popular names:

Or the most popular breeds:

And since the data goes back to to 2015, we can even see how popularity of different names has changed over time. Why has Luna had such a meteoric rise, I wonder?

I don’t know very much about dogs. But one of the most interesting things about New York is the huge variance in wealth & demographics between neighborhoods, and I wanted to explore how that translated to the city’s pups. There are pockets of NYC that still feel like Bonfire of the Vanities WASP enclaves. And there are many more vibrant & diverse neighborhoods and there are neighborhoods that are quite poor.

In Manhattan alone there is more than $100k difference in median income between the poorest and the richest neighborhoods; the Upper East Side boasts a median income ~5x more than East Harlem to its north:

Income and Neighborhoods

Because the dog registration data has ZIP codes, we can join it to census data to understand how people in different neighborhoods and with different levels of wealth differ in the breeds and names they choose for their dogs.

For example, these are the dog names with the highest average income, based on the average of their ZIP codes’ median incomes.

You can see that Noa, Finnley, Gustav, Starbuck and the gang are all pulling in healthy six figure salaries, which is impressive when you consider the slack in the white collar labor market, and the fact that they’re dogs.

These are limited to dog names that occur at least 10 times in the dataset.

It doesn’t show up here, because there is only one of them, but apparently there’s a dog in Gramercy named EBITDOG.

I particularly like "Islay” and “Bogey,” because I picture a patrician old rich guy, sitting in a plush leather armchair chair, drinking scotch and watching old Humphrey Bogart movies with his two hunting dogs nestled in front of a roaring fire.

We can add more color to this by plotting the richest breeds of dog:

I don’t know most of these, and can’t pronounce several of them. “Barbet” and “Briard” sound like prep schools, but doing some quick image searching, the Afghan Hound is my favorite rich person dog. These dogs definitely live in a sprawling Park Avenue penthouse, have quietly distanced themselves from the Sackler family, and have spent their entire summer “out east.”

Of course, neighborhoods across New York are distinct from one another, even the rich ones; I would expect a 35-year-old creative director in Cobble Hill’s dog to be quite different from our old money scotch grandpa’s pups on the Upper East Side. To understand this, we can use TF-IDF scores to look at the names that appear disproportionately in different places.

At the Borough level:

“Banksy” being distinctive to Manhattan and Brooklyn is very funny. I have to admit that I really like the name “Rhubarb” for a dog (because I really like rhubarb treats) and I live in Brooklyn.

We can zoom in on Brooklyn neighborhoods. The categorizations are a little strange based on the ZIP code mappings I could find; “Northwest Brooklyn” here is Brooklyn Heights / Cobble Hill, while Wburg / Bushwick and Greenpoint are their own categories.

Bushwick & Williamsburg’s distinctive names read like a cocktail menu, a fig-scotch-lemon drink could absolutely be sold for $17 in Bushwick and whipped up by a bartender named Harper at the Marlowe. And after the cocktail you could head to Greenpoint for “Gnocchi.”

I really like the names in Flatbush; Etta is a nice name and prompted me to listen to this lovely Etta James song. And Joseph is a good name for both dogs and data analysts.

You can see where different dog names are registered with this little tool; just enter whatever name you’re interested in in the “Dog Name” box and hit enter. For example, the fact that there a bunch of little Starbuck dogs scampering around the Upper West Side makes way too much sense. Tough.

If you need inspiration, some other amusing ones I searched for were “avocado,” “rothko,” “trotsky,” “martini,” and “bagel.” Email or tweet me fun ones you find!

Thanks for reading! If you liked this, you might be interested in this post about new york neighborhoods featured in the NYT dining section, it’s kinda similar.

1. I checked for a friend’s dog and she was not in the dataset. Naturally I reported this to the relevant authorities. There are a substantial number of cases where the dog’s name is unreported; I excluded these from the dataset.