JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
In New York City's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, goldfish are the talk of the block. A broken sidewalk with a leaky metal fire hydrant is now a colorfully decorated fish pond. WNYC's Rosemary Misdary paid a visit.
ROSEMARY MISDARY, BYLINE: Bedford-Stuyvesant is a slowly gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. The community has very little green space. Sidewalks and front stoops are where residents gather and cool off. Val Crawford has been living here for 47 years.
VAL CRAWFORD: The gentrification really was tearing us apart. We've been sitting over here for years, just sitting here, catching the breeze. People will walk past and not even speak. Sometimes, you say hello. They don't say hello back.
MISDARY: On a whim, residents near the corner of Hancock Street and Tompkins Avenue dumped scores of goldfish into a four-inch-deep concrete crater around a hydrant dripping water. Hajj-Malik Lovick is one of the aquarium's creators.
HAJJ-MALIK LOVICK: It was a little hole right there, dry. And my friend was like, what if we put it - some fish in there? We took it as a joke, and he went and bought them. He put 50 fish in there, and people stopped by, and they dropped their ornaments.
MISDARY: More than a hundred little orange fish swim around shells, minicastles and SpongeBob's pineapple house. Cyclists and pedestrians stop and gaze with smiles. Aquarium volunteer Devang Shah says it's become more than just a goldfish pond.
DEVANG SHAH: We are creating a public living room for the entire neighborhood. So the actual conversations and dynamic between the neighbors in this block has completely changed.
MISDARY: Despite protests from a few newcomers, Crawford, Shah and Lovick say the sidewalk fish are healing the division between neighbors.
CRAWFORD: Once the pond is here, everybody walks up and wants to speak, and nobody's being judgmental.
SHAH: Every day is just smiles. People that are stressed come here right after work and sit on the bench and just stare at the pond.
LOVICK: Seeing how they swim, seeing how they go through all the little ornaments and things like that is a beautiful thing. Like, they bring a lot of joy. They bring a lot of laughter. They bring a lot of people together, a lot of love.
MISDARY: But winter is coming, and the goldfish won't survive the cold in a shallow concrete hole.
SHAH: There's a lot of different options. We have offers to just put the fish in a large aquarium for the winter while we do the proper construction to make it deeper, to put it in a pond liner.
MISDARY: Eventually, the Bed-Stuy aquarium team plans to seek city approval for the goldfish pond. They hope to transform it into a year-round sanctuary with a solar-powered heater and a plexiglass enclosure.
For NPR News, I'm Rosemary Misdary in New York City.
(SOUNDBITE OF VALNTN, SWEATER BEATS AND TREVOR DERING SONG, "COTTON CANDY CLOUDS (SLOWED DOWN VERSION)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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