Fish inspire murals in bathroom

Allan Gurevitz said he thinks the fish currently living in the Runcible Spoon bathroom are the happiest he’s ever seen. He’d know. He feeds them.

Gurevitz is the janitor, and every night as customers trickle out of the restaurant, Gurevitz sweeps the floor, cleans the bathrooms and feeds the fish in the tub.
Besides caring for the fish, Gurevitz is also responsible for the mural that is slowly taking over the bathroom.

The fish have inspired an array of art in this unsuspecting location, from the wall collages to the mosaic tiles on the floor.

“I have a sense of how far I want to take it, but I don’t know what it will actually look like,” he said. “It’s mostly looking at pictures and seeing what’s there and looking at it. It’s not that conscious. ... People tell (the owner) stuff about the fish. They ask about the fish as if they are the most important thing. People want to have them. Maybe they need them.”

Gurevitz is also the artist of the mural in the bathroom and two other collages throughout the restaurant.

The mural, a mixture of images Gurevitz has cut out of magazines and compiled through time, started on one wall with images of fish, dolphins and other sea-like creatures. Once the door began to compile graffiti, Gurevitz began to cover it up with his collage. It has now overtaken a majority of the room, and gradually, less and less white wall is visible.

“I think a lot of collages people do are chaotic because they think they’re easy to do, and they don’t pull it all together, and that’s a big part of it,” he said. “You don’t know necessarily yourself what you’re doing, and you definitely don’t know how it’s going to come out until it’s done.”

Rumor has it that in the 1980s an employee left for vacation and asked to leave a fish in the bathroom. When the employee never came back, the previous restaurant owners simply let the fish live there.

“Since then we’ve just maintained it,” said Regen O’Neill, who bought the restaurant with her husband in 2001. “We have to try and maintain it because we do get a lot of visitors. Some people look at it and just think it’s weird, and some people are freaked out by fish. I think it adds to the quirkiness of the bathroom.”

For visitors who don’t know about the fish, it can come as a bit of a shock.

“I was surprised the first time,” said Alexandra Gorlin, who has been coming to the restaurant for the past five years. “I wasn’t taken aback though, I was just sort of like, ‘Are those fish?’ I think it goes with the sort of spirit of Runcible Spoon.”

Besides underwater creatures, the walls are covered with images of statues, masks, Egyptians, Jesus Christ, flowers, monsters, snacks, bats and a plethora of magazine clippings. Gurevitz even took rocks from the Jordan River and placed them in the tub.

“I don’t know if that’s legal,” he said.

At one point, a visitor put two black-and-white stickers on a plastic dispenser in the bathroom. Gurevitz said he liked what the stickers were saying, but he thought he could add to it. Now the dispenser is just one more thing that is covered with Gurevitz’s collage.

“I can look at it and still see new things,” he said. “It’s like looking in the mirror, but your reflection keeps changing. You can never really get to the bottom of it.”

There are also handmade tiles covering the floor created by Danielle Urschel, a regular customer of Runcible Spoon.

She created the original tiles, which had waves on them, but replaced them about a year ago with images of multicolored fish, some resembling a goldfish and a gray, red and transparent fish currently in the tub.

“People will come through and say, ‘We’re just using the bathroom,’” O’Neill said. “Little kids, once they discover it, will make three or four trips to the bathroom even though it’s probably not necessary. People won’t use the other bathroom.”

The bathroom has gone through different levels of changes. Besides the artwork, the fish have been stolen or visitors have put their own fish in, Gurevitz said.

The two fish that currently live in the tub were born in the pond that used to be outside the restaurant about three years ago. The tub currently has a filter system and has to be cleaned every other month.

“It never had to be cleaned before the filter system,” Gurevitz said. “The tub was all green on the bottom and people would get freaked out, but I thought it was beautiful because it was ecologically clean.”

Joe Loop, a customer who has been coming to the restaurant for years, has seen the transformation the restroom has undergone and appreciates the amount of maintenance the owners have put into it.

“It’s quite attractive,” Loop said. “There’s a lot of oohs and ahhs when people bring their friends in. The first thing they do is show them the bathroom.”