Store of the Month – May 2023

The Hidden Reef

4501 New Falls Rd
Levittown, PA 19056
(215) 269-4930

Website: https://www.thehiddenreef.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thehiddenreef
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thehiddenreef/

Siegfried (Ziggy) Gutekunst was born in the United States and returned to Germany with his mother when he was eight years old. He acquired his first aquarium when he was ten. It contained the usual fare—mollies, guppies, gourami’s, and plants. As with most livebearers, nature did her thing and the inhabitants multiplied rapidly. Being restricted by his mother to a single 10-gallon aquarium was tough with all the baby fish he had, so he made arrangements with his school to trade fish for lunch money, as they had a 200-gallon aquarium and space wasn’t an issue. He kept that 10-gallon aquarium until he was 15 and never got anything bigger because his mother said, “You will tire of it and waste a lot of money.” 

History of the Store
In 1995, the brief ownership of a maintenance company called Sealife Aquarium Designs and wholesale business called US Marine Imports and love of tropical fish led Ziggy to open the original Hidden Reef Aquarium. The store was actually hidden in the basement of a hardware store in the back of a shopping center in northeast Philadelphia. In spite of its location, limited aquarium and floor space, and the absence of a sign, the business flourished.

Within one year, most of the hardware store became the The Hidden Reef’s dry goods section. Shortly after, an adjacent store became their expanded fishroom. The store grew from 1400 to 5600 square feet. Customers would often joke that you could buy your fish and have your keys made all in the same place!

2003 was a sad year for Ziggy and all at the Hidden Reef, as their dear friend and partner George Kunz lost his battle with Hodgkin’s disease. It was George’s reef aquarium and inspiration that made The Hidden Reef a reality.

Tragedy struck again right before Christmas two years later. The Hidden Reef was destroyed by a fire that started in another store in the shopping center. “We lost all the animals except for a few, as we kept running in and out while the store was burning; the firemen were chasing us, but we were able to save most of the corals,” Ziggy said.

After the fire, The Hidden Reef did not have a new home until July 2006. It took until April of the following year just to get the front of the new store opened. It was nine months of long, hard work. Then it was time to tackle the fish room. One hundred and fifty pounds of screws, 1400 two by fours, and a lot of paint and PVC pipe went into completing that room.

The Store Today
The modern-day store is over 20,000 square feet. Of this, 6800 square feet is home to 450-plus aquariums. Out of these, 40 are devoted to corals, 145 are saltwater, and more than 250 are freshwater.  To give you an idea of the size of the store it was originally a supermarket and then a ballroom before becoming the Hidden Reef.

All the filtration for the fish room is located in the basement, which is slightly larger than the square footage of the store above. There are 16 individual 1000-gallon systems, each with a 300-gallon sump that turns the water over at least five times per hour. In total, the system contains 720 gallons of bio-media. Attached to each system is a bio-tower, with a 10-inch filter sock that is changed daily. Each system is also equipped with a commercial-grade ultraviolet (UV) sterilizer. Two reverse osmosis (RO) units produce 1300 gallons of RO water per day. Any individual tank running in the fish room has a separate filter and UV sterilizer attached.

In recent years, Ziggy has made moves to grow the reptile department in the store and now boasts over 40 display tanks with a HUGE variety of animals, as well as any and all products that someone could possibly need!

When asked if there is any advice, morals, or lessons pertaining to the fish business to pass along, Ziggy replies with the usual: “You never know where life will take you.” He did, however, have this to add: “Don’t listen to your mother!”