It was a sad scene at the Bed-Stuy Aquarium Wednesday morning. The makeshift fish pond, formed in a tree pit thanks to a leaky hydrant and the efforts of some longtime residents near the corner of Hancock and Tompkins, was dry and covered with cardboard. (Presumably to keep the dead fish concealed.) Against this backdrop, one of the pit’s stewards was talking to a local news reporter. The day before, the Fire Department had conducted what it said was a semi-annual inspection of the hydrant, which ended up flooding the fish with murky-looking water. In the hours that followed, neighbors say, the fish were still alive, but the water levels had started to drop. Someone even poured a giant bottle of Fiji into the pit thinking it might help. By morning it was done. “They don’t let us have anything nice,” the pond-keeper told the reporter, clearly upset.
The little Bed-Stuy puddle has seen a lot of drama since it first appeared in August. To its creators, the decision to buy 50 goldfish at a pet store and turn the soggy tree pit into an ad hoc habitat was a way to beautify the neighborhood. People started decorating it with colored rocks and shells. “The kids loved it,” an onlooker said Wednesday. Others were concerned. The water from a leaky fire hydrant collecting inside a New York City sidewalk is not exactly a natural home for fish. (A fish veterinarian told Curbed that chlorinated hydrant water is in fact toxic for goldfish; the pond’s creators looked into getting a portable filter.) At one point this summer, a woman tried to remove the goldfish but got into an argument with some of the pond’s tenders. She ended up coming back later, organizing a sort of low-stakes heist to remove some of them. The people behind the pond called it theft. Also in the mix: random destructive idiots. At the end of August, someone stomped all over the pond, killing many of the fish. Its creators restored it, and a Bed-Stuy Aquarium GoFundMe popped up, raising over $3,000 that the organizers used to host a backpack and goldfish giveaway for kids.
While this was playing out in person, the internet, or at least a corner of it, lit up. It was as heated as you might imagine. The pond discourse — which included accusations of racist gentrification and animal abuse — eventually got so out of hand that the moderator of the Bed-Stuy Reddit had to institute a rule of “no more puddle posts.” The fish puddle somehow became a proxy battle for everything else happening in the neighborhood, a historically Black, formerly redlined part of north Brooklyn that has, for some time now, also become home to wealthy college students and white creative directors in search of a brownstone. “They knew what they were doing,” Hajj-Malik Lovick, one of the pond’s creators, said of the Fire Department on TikTok. The people who loved the pond really loved it. It used to be a garbage-y pit that became something sort of nice, if maybe not always for the fish.
The whole thing isn’t over yet. The puddle will likely come back, and these fights can ignite anew. Lovick said in a TikTok video that he was going to put remaining donations back into the pond: “We’re gonna make it back better.”