Its mid-August, on a hot summer day in Brooklyn. At the intersection of Tompkins Avenue and Hancock Street in Bed-Stuy, you’ll find a gathering of people on the sidewalk, huddled around a leaky fire hydrant. Children are laughing excitedly, pointing at the ground; their mothers smile behind their phones, taking pictures. From the spout of the fire hydrant, a steady stream of droplets trickles into the gravel pit below, where a group of locals has created the “Bed-Stuy Aquarium,” a community goldfish pond.

In the three weeks since its creation, the pond has been filled with community offerings—inscribed and initialed stones and seashells, plant clippings, colorful beads. A bright red ceramic mushroom is nestled in the gravel next to a plastic tube that serves as a tunnel for goldfish to swim through.

“The shells are from all over. Atlantic City, Brighton Beach, Vegas… Make sure to bring you own shell next time!” says Hajj-Malik Lovick, one of the Bed-Stuy Aquarium’s caretakers, who has been living in the neighborhood for 47-years.

Hajj knows many of his neighbors and takes pride in watching over the pond. He and a few others take shifts around the clock, coordinating with their work schedules to ensure the pond is well-maintained. Traffic cones are placed in the street next to the fire hydrant, and Hajj watches for cars, warning fish-admirers when a car approaches.

Together, they clean the water, feed the fish, and keep spirits high and joyful for the community. Hajj recognizes a little girl in a stroller approaching the pond and greets her cheerfully, “this little girl, she comes here every day!”

While the new micro-blue space has been received by most of the community with much joy and excitement, there has been some pushback — some residents claiming animal cruelty and attempting to “rescue” goldfish in the middle of the night, as reported by the New York Times. The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) also came by at one point to shut off the fire hydrant, telling the fish guardians to find a better location for the fish. While the DEP pushed back on the pond, the FDNY did not take issue with it, according to Hajj in an interview with the New York Post. “They came and said there is no pressure lost, the caps are still on, it’s not a leaky hydrant, it’s a well-functioning hydrant. If something happens, the Fire Department has all access.”

Despite some controversy, the outpour of community support, including viral videos on X and TikTok, and a GoFundMe page titled “Help fire hydrant fish survive and thrive,” which raised $2,645 in just two weeks, Hajj and his team got the Bed-Stuy Aquarium back up and running.

UPDATE: In October 2024, the city paved over the Bed-Stuy Aquarium, sparking anger and protest from the community. In response, residents placed a plexiglass-filled water tank next to the tree by the fire hydrant as an act of protest, grief, and overwhelming love for what the community had built. While the tank not the same as the original, the aquarium has yet again become filled with goldfish and vibrant community offerings, keeping the spirit of the aquarium thriving and proving the resilient community power behind the aquarium.

The Bed-Stuy Aquarium is an example of the joy that can be sparked from spontaneous, community-led, and low-budget interventions.

It is an example of Emergent Urbanism— light-touch urban planning and design that allows public spaces to respond to dynamic community needs.

In New York City, where a jumble of agencies, public-private partnerships, and other organizations govern and manage public space, getting things done can be an arduous, bureaucratic process of forms, approvals, and permits. But in a climate-crisis reality where summer heat and storms are increasingly fatal, the urban fabric needs to nimbly and quickly adapt to its changing surroundings.

Hajj and other aquarium caretakers made headlines by taking over a gravel ditch in the sidewalk. Why is it so unheard of in New York City to repurpose the street for play? Should such a simple intervention really be so revolutionary? Shouldn’t it be easier for community members to adapt public space to purposes that the community wants?

The decentralized, distributed infrastructure of fire hydrants as methodology

New York City is no stranger to use of fire hydrants for street cooling and play. For over 100 years, New Yorkers have turned to fire hydrants for relief during hot summer days. Just look to the boisterous scene in Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing” where water from a fire hydrant shoots out into a street in Bed-Stuy during a heat wave, where kids and adults splash and shout.

Fire hydrants operate under the jurisdiction of the Department of Environmental Protection and maintained by FDNY. Some fire hydrants can be adjusted for public use by adding spray caps, which must be formally requested by a community member and installed on the hydrant by the FDNY. Spray caps allow water flow at a safe level that does not compromise the water pressure needed by firefighters. There are currently 781 spray cap-enabled fire hydrants (out of 109,410 total citywide fire hydrants), and the Adams administration has promised to proactively install more spray caps under the Cool It! Initiative.

Many neighborhoods in New York City, particularly those with higher percentage of Black and low-income residents, are at risk for extreme heat, as depicted by the Heat Vulnerability Index. Neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy are not close to major green spaces like Prospect Park that help to cool down temperatures, and need more interventions that help to cool down street temperatures.

In New York City, almost every street has about four fire hydrants. Streets form the basic building blocks of the city, connecting neighborhoods on both a small scale (individual blocks) and a large scale (the entire city). Fire hydrants, as essential public safety and water supply infrastructure, are evenly distributed throughout these streets. This decentralized layout integrates them seamlessly into both the local and citywide fabric.

What if community members had access to at least one fire hydrant per block and permission to use the water supply and the few square feet that surround it, to be repurposed for community use like a community goldfish pond or a mini garden?

Access to fire hydrants for the FDNY is critical and should be treated with care. However, since the FDNY already permits many hydrants to be used during the summer for street spraying, why not allow a small, controlled amount of water to seep into the soil to irrigate a mini garden? In the event of a fire, the FDNY retains full access to the water supply and pressure needed for firefighting. Clear space and obstruction limits can also be established around the hydrant to ensure nothing interferes with firefighters connecting the hose to the nozzle.

It is necessary to implement a permission process that is quick, nimble, and streamlines the current system’s many bureaucratic hoops and hurdles. New York City can look to pilot projects experimenting with community-driven permissions systems to help community members to self-govern public space, like Dark Matter Labs' pilot project in Daegu, South Korea, providing proof of concept for communities who want to innovate within the bureaucratic process to proactively shape their neighborhoods.

If the city created a simple, accessible process for residents like Hajj to request and gain permission to use fire hydrants for community purposes—without obstructing the FDNY—it could transform public spaces to better serve neighborhood needs. A streamlined, scalable system like this would empower community members to take the lead on local initiatives, encourage the creation of micro-green spaces in urban heat islands, and bring tangible benefits to neighborhoods across NYC.

Hajj suggested that if this idea were implemented on a larger scale, it could even create jobs for local residents by paying stewards to maintain these spaces. In the case of the Bed-Stuy Aquarium, Hajj also highlighted its educational value, as it teaches children about fish and the habitats they need to survive.

The Bed-Stuy Goldfish case study shows that a simple fire hydrant can become a community gathering spot, serving its neighborhood in ways far beyond its original purpose. City governments should adapt their permitting processes for public infrastructure to give residents more opportunities to bring play into their neighborhoods. This wouldn’t just create happier spaces but also make neighborhoods more resilient, greener, and better connected. Adaptive, emergent urban interventions like this can bring joy, togetherness, and much-needed cooling infrastructure to the communities that need it most.

According to Hajj, for initiatives like the Bed-Stuy Aquarium to spread and serve as a successful model for other neighborhoods, "we have to make it better than the alternative.” It’s much harder for the city to justify shutting down a goldfish pond when it provides far more value to the community than the gravel ditch it replaced. “There’s always going to be something,” Hajj said, referring to the disheartening resistance from the city “but the good will win.”