The food court fountain at Northpark was a koi pond until 1989

I keep seeing people post about that empty mall in Birmingham and calling the dried up basin a "fountain pit" when it was actually a koi pond with a bridge over it. My aunt worked at the Waldenbooks there for 11 years and she told me kids would drop pennies in and the koi would swim around them. Anybody else got family that worked at a dead mall and can confirm weird details like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

eva2431mo ago

Actually I'm gonna push back on calling that a "koi pond." My uncle was a maintenance guy at that mall from 87 to 92 and he always called it a fountain pit because that's literally what it was designed to be. The koi were just decorative add-ons that died off way before 89 because people kept throwing trash and pennies in there. He said they pulled dead fish out of the filter system every week. The bridge was just for decoration too, it didn't even go anywhere useful. So when people call it a fountain pit now they're not being disrespectful, they're just calling it what it actually was most of its life.

harper_owens1mo ago

@eva243 What did your uncle say happened to all those pennies people threw in?