Former bank vice president sued by landlord over 14th-floor Bronx apartment fish farm

A Bronx landlord has sued a tenant who turned his high-rise living room into a fish farm that allegedly leaks water into the apartment below and has the hallway stinking like a fish market. Former bank vice president Christopher Toole, 47, created an “aquaponic” — a nonprofit business that encourages urbanites to grow tilapia and other denizens of the deep in their cramped city apartments.

Fed-up neighbours complain that Toole constantly drags water-filled fish-farming equipment across his 14th-floor apartment’s wooden floors at all hours of the night and is to blame for several major water leaks. “It’s irritating because you hear noise all the time. It’s 3:30 in the morning, and you hear him dragging his aquarium or whatever it is across the floor.



It has changed my life,” fumed a frustrated Roch McDowell, whose apartment directly below the oddball fish farmer’s has been swamped with fish-waste tainted water. McDowell said he is reduced to screaming at the ceiling when Toole gets too loud: “Hey a--hole, that’s enough!” The landlord claims Toole is violating his lease by illegally breeding fish and running his Society of Aquaponic Values and Education from his apartment at 4705 Henry Hudson Parkway. Toole has “refused to refrain [from] making noises and causing odors,” the lawsuit charges.

“He’s running a business out of his apartment,” said Errol Brett, the lawyer for landlord Windsor Apts. Inc. Toole’s brainchild is catching on so quickly, he expanded to the Point, a community centre in Hunts Point where he raises fish in a colony of 55-gallon tanks and plastic recycling bins. Toole — who earned an economics degree from Tufts and worked at Morgan Stanley and as a vice president for Sovereign Bank — now toils away teaching neighbourhood kids about fish farming and the art of aquaponics in exchange for space.

There's a video about Mr Toole and his activities here.