(Byron Smith)
AQUA MAN: Ex-bank VP Christopher Toole is being sued by his Riverdale building (top right) for raising tilapia at home. (
)
He put the river in his Riverdale pad.
A Bronx landlord has sued a tenant who turned his high-rise living room into a funky fish farm that allegedly leaks water into the apartment below and has the hallway stinking like the old Fulton Fish Market in July.
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 neighbors 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 center 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 neighborhood kids about fish farming and the art of aquaponics in exchange for space.
The talkative Toole, dubbed the “Fisher King” in an April article in The Post, claimed he was unaware of the lawsuit and refused to talk about it.
Citing Donald Trump, he said, “Any publicity is good publicity.”
Toole sells baby tilapia and female breeders on eBay and Craigslist to support his girlfriend and two kids, 2 and 7, from a previous relationship.
McDowell, an event coordinator in his 60s, just wants peace and quiet in his apartment.
He accused Toole of not having a “good perception of boundaries.”