I’m working on a piece that collects together newspaper articles about things that happened to people and animals in the Gowanus Canal. This incident with the shark is pretty well known but I couldn’t locate the actual article on the internet (there are lots of sites that have the picture and the story as told in the book Heartbeats in the Muck). I wanted to see the original news story. Therefore I had to take a trip to the library and a spin on an old fashioned microfiche machine. Sources online for the image say Brooklyn Eagle, 1950. The Brooklyn Eagle is a daily paper so it was going to be a little bit of a needle in a 1950s haystack. To figure out where to find the story I looked up when sharks would most likely be in the New York Harbor. Based on shark sightings and attacks over the last hundred years or so (and there were many in the 19th-mid 20th century), it’s August. And that is exactly where I found the article — on the August 1950 microfilm spool. Back then the story only merited a caption. Today it’s big news if a big fish makes its way into the canal (or big fishy mammal, like a dolphin and whale). It’s also unlikely that today the police would callously shoot a shark lost in the canal and that the public would approve of killing it. Animals found in the canal are a sign of hope. Even when they die in the canal, the fact that they show up at all allows for the fleeting hope that we didn’t irreversibly screw things up.