NEW YORK — A couple of longtime Brooklyn residents were lounging in the heat last week, staring at a sidewalk tree pit often flooded by a leaky fire hydrant, when they came up with the idea for a makeshift aquarium. "We started joking about: what if we added fish," recalled Hajj-Malik Lovick, 47, a lifelong resident of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. "Since the water is always there sitting in the puddle, why not turn this into something that's more interesting?" After fortifying the edges of the tree bed with rocks and brick, they bought 100 common goldfish from a pet store for $16 and dumped them in.
The appearance of peanut-sized fish swimming around the shallow basin quickly became a neighborhood curiosity, drawing visitors who dubbed it "the Hancock Street Bed-Stuy Aquarium." Fish swim in a pool of water Friday next to a fire hydrant in the Brooklyn borough of New York. But as videos and news stories about the fish pit circulated online, the project drew concern from city officials and backlash from animal rights advocates.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, two neighborhood residents, Emily Campbell and Max David, carried out a rescue mission. Using nets and plastic bags, they pulled about 30 fish from the 2-inch-deep water. They say they were rescuing the fish from inhumane conditions.
But the operation sparked a roiling debate about gentrification in the historically Black neighborhood, which saw an influx of young white residents in recent years. "I'm ve.