NEW YORK: Aquarium Gone

The last visitors shuffled out into the brilliant sunshine of Manhattan’s Battery Park. Inside the Aquarium, the big pool where the sea lions once arched their sleek backs was empty; in the green gloom of the cavernous, dank galleries, water gurgled away, the lights went dark. The world’s biggest marine exhibit, its denizens shipped away, was being dismantled.

Soon a wrecking crew will start tearing down the big grey, circular building that has stood on the Battery for 134 years. Its solid, eight-foot walls will be leveled to make way for the wide approaches to Manhattan’s new vehicular tunnel under the East River to Brooklyn.

The Aquarium was first a fort, built by the Government in 1807 on a rocky, offshore island in Manhattan harbor. Ceded to the city some 15 years later, it became an auditorium, Castle Garden, connected to the mainland by a pier.* At Castle Garden such notables as Lafayette, Louis Kossuth, Edward VII (then Prince of Wales) were publicly welcomed. There Jenny Lind made her U.S. debut in 1850.

From 1855 to 1890, Castle Garden was a reception building for immigrants. Over 7,500,000 passed through its halls into the U.S. before Grover Cleveland (then Governor of New York) transferred the station to Ellis Island. Then for six years the building stood empty. In 1896 it was made an Aquarium.

Into its tanks went sea creatures: sharks, channel bass, tropical lungfish, giant morays, sea turtles, penguins, alligators, crabs. There were monstrous fish, fierce and implacable; sullen, unfriendly fish; fish that clung like parasites to other fish, twisting their sinuous tails in the green water, staring at the shadowy faces beyond the glass. The city gave them 300,000 gallons of water a day—clean salt water from the sea, harbor water, fresh water from the upstate mountain streams.

When New York’s Park Commissioner Robert Moses decided that the Aquarium must go, protests poured in. But sardonic Bob Moses is not easily swayed. Said he: “There is no resemblance between the removal of the Aquarium and the scuttling of Old Ironsides. … In the new plan for Battery Park the Aquarium is an ugly wart on the main axis leading straight to the Statue of Liberty. . . . There is … more honest-to-God romance any early morning in the Fulton Fish Market . . . than in the Aquarium in a month of Sundays. . . .” Commissioner Moses carried on.

One day last week a trailer truck backed up to the Aquarium, rumbled away with 1,000 fish for the Marine Park Aquarium in Boston. A six-foot green moray refused to go, hid under a rock for an hour until a keeper warily prodded him out. Another 2,000 fish left for aquariums in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington. The sea lions now rest uneasily in the lions’ house at The Bronx Zoo, where some 4,000 smaller fish and reptiles will join them. They will live in the Zoo until a new Aquarium is built at Coney Island. Another 1,000 fish will be poured into the city’s reservoirs.

* Between 1853 and 1872 the marsh separating the island from Manhattan was filled.