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The Bedford-Stuyvesant street aquarium is a much bigger story than it seems. On one level, it’s a simple puddle of water filled with goldfish. It’s also become a beloved focal point of neighborhood social interaction. It was inevitable that fire department maintenance crews would show up sooner or later to fix the leaking hydrant, supplying water flow, and they did. Refusing to give up the feature, local benefactors tried to salvage what they could by installing a pond liner. Within hours, that had been replaced, once and for all, by a freshly poured slab of concrete. That’s not the end of the story. It might be only the beginning of an ongoing saga.
Aquarium in a puddle
The controversial “aquarium” was nothing fancy. Just a puddle of water inhabited by goldfish and decorated with bric-a-brac. The thing which makes it so special is that the miscellaneous small objects of decoration were all donated by members of the local community.
The urban conclave of Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York, is swallowed up by the sea of concrete called Brooklyn. Residents there have been socially conditioned not to even make eye contact with each other, in fear of deadly consequences.
Spontaneously, a leaking fire hydrant sparked a social revolution. One that a young aspiring Sociology student could use for a PhD thesis. Urban residents apparently get tremendous benefits from a feature which only occupies the space of a single sidewalk square. The aquarium attracted attention, both positive and negative, all summer long.
More controversy swirled over the fate of the goldfish through the winter. Nobody managing the grassroots project or contributing improvements took into consideration that the leaking hydrant would eventually be fixed.
As the city began to take action, they used considerable restraint. Relentlessly, the machinery of urban bureaucracy crawled into action one step at a time. To be met with acts of resistance and civil disobedience in response. City Department of Environmental Protection workers “shut the hydrant off several times, only to find someone kept turning it back on, officials advise.”
The city won but the defenders of the vanquished aquarium aren’t anywhere close to giving up the fight. City managers could learn a lot from the fierce support for such a micro-feature of “park.” Talk of moving it half a block away to be part of the community garden isn’t sitting well with the fans of what was just demolished. “It just adds to the aesthetic of the neighborhood as a point of interest, as a place to come and visit,” one resident relates. “After breakfast, you could go see the fishes!”
Not the same
If the residents who became so fondly attached to the aquarium wanted to visit the community garden they could have. To visit this little spot of nature and harmony all they had to do was cross the street. It was nice to look at out the window even for those who didn’t visit. There were lots of visitors.
Neighbors talked and chatted with each other in ways they hadn’t in years. People became involved and started taking pride in their little patch of community. All those eyes watching out the window at the goings on kept crime a little more suppressed.
Those aren’t the sort of things that fans of the aquarium mention when they take to social media to express their views on its fate. Things like that happen on a deeper level that only sociologists seem to notice. “Welp, that didn’t last long,” one post observed when the concrete was poured. “Some people are going to be upset when they wake up this morning.” They were.
“It used to be really lively,” Jonathan Ivan notes. He lives right across the street. “People would come here on their break, just hang out by the fish.”
Stunned residents with little knowledge of utilities maintenance are furious that the community “beautification” project came to such a bitter end. “Votive candles and flowers were laid down Saturday,” New York Daily News reports. “This looks like a memorial,” said Brooklyn resident Kelvin Ukpebor, 38. “It looks like bye-bye to the fish.”
A 2-year-old girl cried out to her mother “it’s gone! The fishes are gone, Mama!” As her stroller was pushed along Hancock St. near Tompkins Ave. No matter what the city does, aquarium supporters lament, “it won’t be able to bring back the magic a few Bedford-Stuyvesant residents made with a broken sidewalk and a busted fireplug.“
