Josleen Wilson spent last Thursday night in her Manhattan apartment listening to Bush and Bloomberg and lesser-known cheerleaders describe the city as “festive” during the blackout. On Friday she watched her tropical fish swim to the top of the living-room aquarium, desperately seeking oxygen. At 2 PM she walked into the bedroom and shut the door.
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“She was my first phone call as soon as the electricity came on,” Hritz said that Sunday. The owner of Crystal Aquarium Service, he’s been making tank calls for over 20 years. He has more than 70 clients, most of them on the Upper East Side. Trained by his father, who owned the Crystal Aquarium Pet Store for more than 50 years and set up a tank for John Kennedy Jr. when he was still called John-John, Hritz has his own list of celebrity clients, including Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates. Many of his current customers are the children of his father’s customers, and he has keys to town houses throughout the area.
Wilson’s three largest fish were floating in the water. “I said, ‘It looks like you lost two or three,’ and she said, ‘Oh, I’m not even gonna look,’” Hritz said. “She wouldn’t even look.”
Afterward, Hritz took a cab to an apartment with two aquariums at 94th and Fifth. The owner was away in the Hamptons, and his tanks were fed by a system that might not have started back up automatically. “I was like, ‘I know if I go to sleep tonight I’m not going to be able to sleep, ’cause I know those fish are going to be dead.’ But they were OK.” All was well at his next stop too, a town house at 83rd and Lexington with three aquariums and a backyard pond. The koi in the pond, he said, “are surface breathers–not as subject to suffocation. No deaths there.”
Wilson never thought she’d need one. “The instructions recommended them for people who live in places that experience power outages,” she said. “I thought, ‘Well, I live in New York. We don’t have power outages.’”
