On Hancock Street on a rainy Thursday in Bedford-Stuyvesant, there is the usual debris seen on a wet day in Brooklyn — a blown-out bodega umbrella, a downed branch from a honey locust tree. But one street’s tree well, just before Tompkins Avenue, holds a surprise. Under the pleasant drip of a fire hydrant, about three dozen goldfish are lazing around in a sidewalk aquarium that doubles as a piece of public art.
Over the past day or so, videos of the goldfish puddle have appeared online with pilgrims stopping by the Tompkins-Hancock corner to see the thing that made them laugh on the computer. In about a ten-minute span early Thursday afternoon, half a dozen people walked by with their phones out to get a video of the little orange carp on the sidewalk. Soon enough, Je-Quan Irving stopped by in a Yankees fitted cap and Polo sweatshirt to explain why he and his friends put $16 worth of goldfish — or roughly 100 of them — in the pool a few days back. “We weren’t doing it for this type of reaction,” said Irving, a 47-year-old Bed-Stuy native who works for Triple AAA. “We did it strictly for the community to make a difference in the community.”
And what does it provide for the community?
“Peace and tranquility,” he said, pointing out the shells and pearls that people had dropped in as décor. (Someone had also left a few loose pieces of rice, which he wasn’t too happy about.) “We’re going to dig this a little bit deeper and make this a pond, and we’re going to put some flowers and things up in here,” he said.
Not everyone in the neighborhood is excited by the makeover. People online have pointed out that a puddle in New York City can’t make a healthy home, even for a fairly hardy pet like the single-tailed common goldfish. On Monday, a woman named Emily — who has lived in Bed-Stuy for close to five years and declined to use her last name out of concern that this could all be blown out of proportion — came by to get the fish out, believing that they had been abandoned. “It didn’t start as a very positive interaction,” she said. “It was kind of like, ‘What are you doing? Don’t take my fish.’”
Speaking with me, Irving said that the fish were in fact being taken care of. “As you see, clean water flows out all day long,” he said, adding that he has been in touch with the city and that the fish were given appropriate food three times a day. “We are investing in trying to get a portable filtration system,” he said.
Emily, who worked on an aquaponic farm in college, told me she was trying to express in “a very nonconfrontational and holistic way that this is not an adequate environment.” She added that the fish are “poor respirators and they also poop a lot, which really creates a lot of waste and high nitrate levels.” She added that she was “aware of the optics. You get this sort of transplant, more or less white yuppie telling these gentlemen who have lived in the community for a long time, ‘Perhaps I know better than you.’”
An expert agreed that this idea might be better for a kid’s book than reality. Dr. Benjamin Rosenbloom, a veterinarian focusing on fish, said that there were many reasons why the puddle would not make a suitable home. Beyond runoff and the many kinds of waste kicked around on a New York City sidewalk on a daily basis, Rosenbloom said that the chlorinated city water coming out of the hydrant damages goldfish gills. “Just on a basic level, it’s toxic to them,” he said. As a long-term solution, a basic dechlorinator of the kind usually placed in fish tanks would not fix this alfresco situation. “Not in a practical sense, because if we’re talking about this constantly flowing into the puddle, then you would have to be constantly adding dechlorinator,” he added.
The tale of the yuppies for guppies was in motion. It was on Tuesday night earlier this week that Emily and friends organized a heist to get several fish out. At zero dark thirty on Wednesday, Emily went herself with a net and plastic bags to catch around 30 fish to rehome in the neighborhood.
Irving was not thrilled. “Talk to us,” he said on Thursday, noting that three of the fish were killed in the exfiltration.
Despite the tense week, Emily believes that the parties involved have more in common than the animal-rights issues that divide them. “We both love fish, and we both dream of having a fish pond one day, and we want to have something nice for our community,” she said. In the interim, online attention is still driving traffic to the corner. As I was leaving, a white guy with a bubble umbrella came up to the puddle. “I found it,” he yelled, pulling out his phone to take a picture.
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