Fishing Under NYC: Gone with the Tides

Fishing Under the City

By Sewell Chan
New York Times

Our ... post about the future of historic preservation in New York City elicited a fascinating comment from Dr. Mark Klein* who offered this intriguing recollection:

Anybody know if people are still fishing in Manhattan basements in buildings constructed over still flowing streams? Recall a story about that in the NYT some 30-35 years ago.

Such is the magic of The New York Times a story like that remains alive in mind so many years later.

Well, with flattery like that, we couldn’t help but look into this.

Our intrepid reporter Andy Newman, of the Brooklyn bureau, wrote back to Dr. Klein yesterday to report the bad news:

My editors asked me to look into whether people still fish under Manhattan. Alas, I think the answer is probably no.

The piece in The Times you recalled was probably a letter published in 1971, .... In it, the author, Jack Gasnick, reminisces about the day 15 or so years before, when he caught (and later ate) an almost-three-pound carp in the basement of his hardware supply house at Second Avenue and 53rd Street.

[Exerpt from letter.]

"...We had a lantern to pierce the cellar darkness and fifteen feet below I clearly saw the stream bubbling and pushing about, five feet wide and up-on its either side, dark green mossed rocks. This lively riverlet was revealed to us exactly as it must have appeared to a Manhattan Indian many years ago.

"With plum-bob and line, I cast in and found the stream to be over six feet deep. The spray splashed up-wards from time to time and standing on the basement floor, I felt its tingling coolness.

"One day I was curious enough to try my hand at fishing. I had an old-fashioned dropline and baited a hook with a piece of sperm-candle. I jiggled the hook for about five minutes and then felt a teasing nibble. Deep in the basement of an ancient tenement on Second Avenue in the heart of midtown New York City, I was fishing.

"Feeling a tug, I hauled up in excitement and there was a carp skipping before me, an almost three pounder. I was brave enough to have it pan-broiled and buttered in our upstairs kitchen and shared it with my brother..."






















[This is a 3 pound carp, but not Mr. Gasnick]

Mr. Gasnick concludes his letter by noting, “But this is all in the past. My little stream is no more! The Corning Glass Building at 56th Street and Fifth Avenue has used up all the water….”

I can’t find anything else in our archives about fishing beneath the city.

Sorry to be the bearer of sad tidings.

In a telephone interview today, John Waldman, an aquatic biologist at Queens College and the author of “Heartbeats in the Muck: The History, Sea Life and Environment of New York Harbor,” said he found the 1971 article “very interesting.”

He called the account very detailed and added, “It is possible, but it would have taken very peculiar and unlikely circumstances for this to have happened.”

But asked whether any carp could be found swimming under Manhattan today, Dr. Waldman said it was virtually impossible: “Fish don’t live in the dark for generations. It just doesn’t happen.”

He told us:

There is this famous brook that bubbles up in the lobby of a building in Lower Manhattan. It’s kind of everyone’s last sad memory of the streams that one covered the island. Apparently you can walk to the fountain and see a device that allows water to trickle through. But there’s no way it’s supporting any kind of vertebrate life. There might be some microbes in it. There’s no way carps are living underground. We have our famous alligators living in the sewers – but that’s a myth.

It’s possible that if there were a surface connection – say, a pond in its path – than organisms might get sucked through and end in strange places.

Update: Dr. Waldman, in response to the comment by C. Murphy (see No. 9 in the comments below), writes:

Cave fish adapted over thousands of years to cave life, losing their eyes and pigmentation in the process. They exist in low densities in only a few cave systems worldwide that flush through edible organic matter from surface waters.

I did not know about the carp in Istanbul. But they either must be receiving food in the same way true cavefish do, from scraps derived from the photosynthetic-based ecology of surface waters, or, someone is feeding them. Food must be exported to subterannean waters in the absence of photosynthesis. Concerning our Manhattan carp from 1971, I believe it possible that these long-lived and hardy creatures survived in this unlikely habitat after having been spawned much earlier under more classic conditions prior to the complete landfilling of the stream. It also is possible that someone dumped them into this underground rivulet at a later point. The least likely scenario is that they were maintaining an ongoing population in those circumstances. But regardless of how they got there, I wonder what food sources could have sustained them?

(*Dr. Klein is a California psychiatrist, presidential candidate, a leader of the father’s rights movement and a frequent comment writer on all of our blogs.)