Fishing in Manhattan

[HOZ]

Come on over! We'll sit in my basement, pop a few cold ones and sit back and.......


fish!



NYT

Fishing Under the City

Our recent 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, which I’ve attached here. 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.