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.”