Fish Foreclosure

Back in the summer of 2001, I helped my sister move down to Washington, DC (yes, members of my family are actually allowed to leave Massachusetts... for brief periods of time). Anyway, while I was down there we decided to see a few of the local sites and as I so often do when I am in a new city, I decided I wanted to see the aquarium. I figured that something with a title as grand as "The National Aquarium" was bound to be good. After all, this was the aquarium which was supposed to represent the entire nation. The National Zoo is certainly one of the best ones around, so it stood to reason that the aquarium would have been just as impressive. Also, it has the right kind of address because it is right off the national mall and near the Smithsonian, which gives it an air of respectability. That is why the fact that we got to the address and found it was the Commerce Department building did not phase me too much. I figured it was just a way to save space, even though it really should have been my first hint to lower my expectations. As it turned out the "aquarium" was in the basement and had all the charm you would expect from the part of a government building where they would normally store reports on the expected growth of the popularity of the penny from the 1940s. Seriously, the Alamo has a nicer basement.

Of course, I am hardly the kind of person who judges a place just by its exterior - I love it when people reconstitute old buildings into quirky apartments rather than tearing the place down and putting up a bunch of cookie-cutter condos and some of the best food comes out of buildings which were never meant to house a restaurant. Thus, if it had turned out that the National Aquarium was filled with exotic fish and rare animals I would still be raving about the time I went to the cool, secret aquarium hidden in Washington, DC. Sadly, my dreams did not come true because, again, the place is subterranean and actually has less light than your average basement apartment. It felt a lot like a dungeon and you end up just feeling bad for all the animals. I know all zoos are essentially animal prisons, but some places do a better job of hiding that fact. The exhibits consisted of a few lobsters, a couple of alligators which may or may not have been stuffed, a nurse shark which appeared to be desperate to get out of the water and while they had the occasional tropical fish their main displayed was a large tank of goldfish. I'm not even joking - your average rich person in Miami has a more impressive collection of fish in their living room, though given the conditions that is probably for the better because if the National Aquarium had some extremely rare fish in this location I would have felt compelled to construct a rescue team.

I bring this up because last week the aquarium learned it is going to be kicked out shortly. You see the Commerce Department needs to do some serious updates to the building and that starts with the basement. So the animals need a new home until renovations are complete, sometime in 2015. Now despite the name of National Aquarium, it turns out the entire place is privately funded so it is not like they can just have taxpayers rent them a new space while the current location gets updated. The Commerce Department has said they will try to help the National Aquarium find a new location around the mall, but they will not delay the start of renovations to do so. If the Aquarium can't find a temporary home for their fish they will have to donate most of their animals to other aquariums, most likely starting with the one in Baltimore. (I think if the fish were allowed to see both locations and vote they would gladly take the short drive up to Baltimore sooner rather than later. For their sake I would hope the move becomes permanent because the Baltimore aquarium is quite impressive and to see how the other fish live only to be thrust back into their cramped basement would actually be cruel. Fish may not have much of a memory but they can tell when the have a lot less room to work with.) As you can see, the clock is ticking.

Part of the problem is that I grew up in Boston, which has one of the best aquariums in the nation. When everything is getting held up against that it was already going to have a hard time meeting my lofty standards. That is why if the aquarium is ever going to come back to DC I hope they do so with either a much better location or at least a better set-up. Since there are only so many ways to dress up a basement I think an entirely new location is in order. Frankly, I feel like they have gotten too hung up on being close to the mall when tourists have shown a willingness to travel provided the sites are interesting enough once they get there (and believe me, the Washington and Lincoln Monuments are not as close to each other as you think they are). There has to be a location which is close enough that people could take public transportation to get there but not too far so that it couldn't be done on the same day as the Air and Space museum. You may think DC doesn't need to have a particularly impressive aquarium because Baltimore's is so close, but I would just like to point out that this is a country which is willing to build a Starbucks across the street from another Starbucks, so don't get hung up on redundancy now. Besides, which city do you think gets more International visitors? I certainly wouldn't want them going back to their home countries telling everyone that this National Aquarium was the best we could do.