The great Brooklyn goldfish heist started, as many dubious plans do, at a bar in the early morning. Inside the Bad Luck Bar in Bedford-Stuyvesant on Thursday, Max David and Emily Campbell met and hatched a simple scheme:
Walk quickly but casually down the street.
Grab as many goldfish as you can.
Walk quickly away.
“Last night was super-smooth,” said Ms. Campbell, 29, who lives in the neighborhood and was racked by what she considered an act, however unintentional, of animal cruelty. In a cement sidewalk pit fed by a leaking fire hydrant, someone had dumped scores of tiny goldfish. Ms. Campbell was certain that they were bound to die. She thought she had to do something, and so, armed with two small fishnets and two large Ziploc bags, she and Mr. David, 32, crept up on the pit.
“We gathered 25-plus fish,” she said.
The after-hours caper was the latest escalation in a neighborhood standoff that has spread far beyond its puddle of origin. It has led to at least one shouting match, days of hand-wringing on social media and concerns ranging from gentrification to basic human decency.
And there are still a bunch of goldfish in the pond.
It all started last week, when Jequan Irving and his friends noticed that a leaky hydrant was filling a gravel pit in the sidewalk with water, near the corner of Hancock Street and Tompkins Avenue. Mr. Irving has lived his entire life near this intersection, which he described as still struggling, despite the gentrification of recent years.
“Bed-Stuy has a bad aura,” said Mr. Irving, 47.
The neglected hydrant gave him and his friends an idea: Why not turn the accidental puddle into a goldfish pond? They went to a pet store on Fulton Street and paid $8 for 50 goldfish, he said. Then they dumped the fish into the little gravel pit, where the fish mingled alongside a brick, some rocks and a few leaves. Someone donated a few seashells, someone else dropped in some pearls.
“We all just came together to do something different for the community,” Mr. Irving said. “We decided to spice it up.”
Where Mr. Irving saw an opportunity for beauty, Ms. Campbell saw animals at risk of disease and death. With her past experience working on an aquaponic farm, and her current interest in using shrimp to clean her own fish tanks, Ms. Campbell took notice early this week when friends DM’d her an Instagram story with a video of the goldfish in the pit.
“They said, ‘Oh, gosh, you should go rescue these abandoned babies,’” Ms. Campbell said.
Instead she met one of Mr. Irving’s friends. At first they argued — he accused her of trying to steal his fish. Tensions eased slightly, Ms. Campbell said, as she suggested other ways to care for the fish, including water filters and larger tanks. He was not, she said, “super-receptive.”
Ms. Campbell described the encounter on Reddit, describing her fear of “the optics of this; uppity white transplant lecturing older Black man about his neighborhood.” Her post took on a life of its own. Commenters asked whether the fish were safe. Some began to speak of undercover rescue operations, some jokingly, some not.
“Let’s form an angry rescue mob,” a poster with the username Ekkodal wrote. “JK!”
As talk of a rescue continued, Ms. Campbell and Mr. David decided it was up to them.
“I did some covert recon,” Mr. David said on Thursday evening, describing a walk to scope out the gravel pit. “We just had to act.”
Mr. Irving counters that the goldfish were chosen with care, and their environment continues to improve.
“It’s the lowest-maintenance fish that you can use,” he said, adding that the fish are being fed three times a day. “We’re going to put some algae in here, underground lights in here.”
He views the “liberation” as simple theft.
“We bought these fish, and we fixed up this little spot, using our hard-earned money,” he said. “And they came and stole them.”
The rescue attempts continued. Esther Schweke learned of the dispute on social media. On Thursday night she placed Tupperware bowls in a bag and rode her bicycle from her apartment in Crown Heights to the puddle in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
“I’m not going to watch goldfish die,” said Ms. Schweke, 34, who was dissuaded from taking any fish by the presence of a small crowd of people nearby.
Sean Perry, a veterinarian at the Mississippi Aquarium, confirmed Ms. Campbell’s concerns that goldfish are not as hardy as they seem. They are vulnerable to chlorine, ammonia, water temperature fluctuations and rainstorms, which could flood the pit and send all the goldfish into the nearest sewer drain.
“I think the best situation would be to find homes for them rather than put them in a puddle,” Mr. Perry said.
In fact, goldfish are protected as domestic animals under New York State’s animal cruelty law, said Karen Copeland, a lawyer who specializes in animal law. She cited an appellate court decision in 2006, People v. Michael Garcia, in which the defendant was found guilty of aggravated cruelty — a felony — for squishing his partner’s goldfish with his foot.
“I think throwing goldfish into a gravel pit and not giving them what it takes for them to survive would be considered aggravated cruelty,” Ms. Copeland said.
But in the neighborhood, all the online anger directed at the goldfish keepers won more support for the pool, Mr. Irving said. Over the last week, the number of people pledging to feed and care for the fish just where they are has grown from eight to 15.
Between the play of light on the orange backs of the fish, the sound of water falling into the makeshift pond, the shells deposited along the bottom and fish food sprinkled across the water, Brooklyn’s tiniest goldfish pond was meant to bring the neighborhood “peace and tranquility,” Mr. Irving said.
The post Was the Great Brooklyn Goldfish Heist a Rescue? Or a Robbery? appeared first on New York Times.
