Decades before Instagram or #packwalk, Jim Buck was trouping through the streets of New York with multiple leashes and multiple dogs in tow. In 1964, Gay Talese profiled Buck, pictured above, in The New York Times. “145-Pounder Walks 500 Pounds of Dogs,” ran the headline. That doesn’t sound exceptional now, but Buck was apparently the first professional dog walker. In the story , Talese noted that Buck was 32, married with two children and two big dogs of his own . He was making a decent income — in the low six figures, in today’s dollars — in electronic sales. But, Talese explained, Buck was bored. He loved animals and the outdoors, so, with “a little advertising and a little salesmanship,” he began a dog-walking business and not only earned a living but also became a fixture of the Upper East Side.

As Talese reported it, Buck always drew a crowd. “Hook up a sled!” cried one doorman. “Opening race at Aqueduct!” was one policeman’s quip. When Buck died in 2013, his Times obituary said he “ is widely described as the first person to professionalize dog walking in New York City and, by extension, in the United States. ... He walked in sun; he walked in rain. In wintertime, his charges might be clad in small sweaters bearing the logos of the European resorts where their masters skied.”

When we began the process of digitizing the six million photos in the Times archive, it quickly became apparent that in photographing New York City over the course of the 20th century, this paper photographed a lot of the city’s dogs. One thing that stood out: while the people, the fashion and the cars changed, the dogs stayed very much the same.

We also noticed that dog pictures popped up everywhere, from the style pages to the weather reports, from Metro to Sports. In much the same way that dogs of Instagram say a hundred delightful things without actually saying a word, these images speak to “urban love stories: how and why people fetch, sit and roll over for their pets,” as N.R. Kleinfield put it.