In a space not much bigger than a typical office cubicle, two lemon sharks and two nurse sharks share quarters with a red drum fish, a remora, and a rescued juvenile sea turtle from Georgia named Harold. Harold, as it happens, is an interloper. Ralph Lauren online The tank next door is actually his home, but it sits empty, hidden behind a white curtain, having sprung a leak.
Though they are the largest specimens in the aquarium, the sharks are juveniles. There just isn't enough room here in Room B 077 in the Hoover Building basement, at 14th Street and Constitution Avenue NW, for full grown animals, unless they're clown fish or tree frogs. At about 4 feet in length, the sharks are already getting too big for their digs. And, it turns out, they have a "condition."
"Our lemon sharks have what we believe is a neurological condition and will occasionally lie on their side," explains a laminated typed note taped to the glass. "The cause of the condition is undetermined at this time. Despite this condition, they are still eating well and remain otherwise healthy. In addition, they are outgrowing our exhibit so we are identifying a facility that can accommodate their size and possibly determine the cause of the neurological condition. Thank you for your understanding."
Things are a little more promising over by the alligator exhibit, which is not hard to find, because of the abruptly harsh glare of the track lights bouncing off its shiny acrylic walls. Through them, you can see four American alligators yes, they are juveniles, too standing perfectly still in a naturalistic pond or lying motionless along the edge beneath sunlamps. An interactive computer quiz attached to the alligator case distracts your attention with an incessant, annoying doing. But at least the alligators don't seem to have any "conditions," beyond their natural lethargy.
There must have been a time when this basement room, now crammed with some 80 fish tanks, some no bigger than grade school terrariums, was an architecturally pleasing place. But that was before three grand open pools, made of black marble and running down the center of the room, were covered over with another row of tanks. And before office workers upstairs in the building complained of noise bouncing off the walls, causing the vaulted ceilings to disappear behind a claustrophobia inducing drop ceiling made of ordinary acoustic tile. And before somebody decided that the marble walls would look much better covered by navy blue drywall.
If you run your fingers along the edges of the tanks, you can feel the rough surfaces of the brass frames that have been corroded over the years by salt. The tanks are set too high for small children to be able to see into, so steps were built in front of the tanks for kids to get a better look. Except the aquarium is so dark that visitors began tripping over them. So the steps are no more.
Welcome to the National Aquarium, Washington's most forlorn tourist attraction.
As the nation's oldest continuously operating public aquarium, the National Aquarium holds a venerable place in history; it's the present that has been the real problem. For decades, the place has been engaged in a losing battle to stay current. Washington's aquarium has lived in the shadow of the better known and vastly bigger and more exciting National Aquarium in Baltimore ever since it opened, in 1979. And as more cities have built "destination" aquariums like the one at the Inner Harbor, more visitors who make the trek down to the basement of the Hoover Building find themselves considerably underwhelmed. Of course, that applies only to those who know that Washington's aquarium exists.
In other major cities, aquariums, like art museums, are symbols of civic pride. San Francisco has the Steinhart Aquarium. Boston has the New England Aquarium. Monterey, Calif., has what many consider the nation's finest, the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Ralph Lauren online And Chicago has the nation's largest, the John G. Shedd Aquarium. Despite its name, the National Aquarium is one of the few major cultural institutions in the District that isn't part of the Smithsonian Institution. But it's also one of the most obscure. As is typical of Washington, no one has the heart to demolish a landmark, but neither has anyone mustered the will to improve it.
Twenty minutes to go before the Wednesday shark feeding. A busload of fifth graders from Charlottesville, Va., have just shattered the librarylike silence of the aquarium's darkened hallways. Four foot high chattering bundles of hats, puffy coats, and scarves have taken over the lobby. Three boys immediately surround the "touch tank," a shallow pool of brackish water surrounded by fiberglass "rocks," one of which has a gaping hole in it. In the pool are horseshoe crabs and two kinds of whelk. With their arms in the water up to their elbows, the boys poke at a crab in the corner of the pool.
