Frank Runyeon

One at a time, those coins people toss into the pink granite fountain at Bryant Park add up: penny, penny, nickel, quarter, euro.

Every once in a while, the park drains the fountain and hauls them out. Wednesday was one of those days. Workers filled two painter’s buckets with grimy change.

It will take days to dry, clean and count the money, but the park estimated the take – three months’ worth — at about $2,000.

“Making me feel like I’m working in Fort Knox, a little bit,” said Steven Graham, 49, a park maintenance worker, as he carried a dustpan full of grubby change out of the fountain bed and dumped it into a bucket.

The March haul is the year’s biggest. While the Bryant Park Corporation cleans the fountain more regularly in the warmer months to keep pollen and leaves from clogging the pipes, coin tossing peaks around Christmas, as tourists and New Yorkers alike crowd the park, ice-skate and shop at the Christmas market. Last year, the park collected $3,419 from the fountain.

“From January to October, you can’t even get a bucket full,” said Evanston Crichlow, 59, who’s been cleaning the fountain since 1991.

On Wednesday, no one was throwing pennies – just staring as Mr. Crichlow stood in the upper bowl of the fountain and pushed waves of water and currency over the brim to be collected from the empty basin below.

Sitting on a makeshift stool, Joseph Rice, 41, scooped up another double handful of copper and silver from the bucket and spread it around a 3-foot-by-3-foot sieve, looking like an urban prospector.

“It’s a lot of work,” Mr. Rice said. He pushed his hands through the wet mass of coins, then stopped to pick out detritus: gum, decomposed leaves, washers, screws, stones, a necklace chain.

“There’s an alligator!” he called to Mr. Crichlow, holding the creature aloft.

“Oh, that’s another one,” Mr. Crichlow said, gesturing back at a plastic reptile propped up on a fountain ledge. “I had two rubber snakes, but somebody took one. The kids, you know.”

Five-year-old Eva Issen was more interested in the cash, crouching down to pluck stray pennies from the flagstone around the fountain. Her mother, Vittoria Issen, was less excited.

“Smell it, it smells disgusting!” Ms. Issen admonished her daughter.

“That’s O.K!” Eva replied brightly.

Jerome Barth, the park corporation’s director of operations, does not mind the stinky money either: the park gets to keep it — well, some of it.

The foreign currencies, which can’t be exchanged in small amounts, are kept in a bag until someone in the office travels to that country. But they’re not exactly making a killing. “The last time someone went to England it was about 3 dollars,” Mr. Barth said.

The American currency is washed, dried, bagged, fed into a sorting machine at a bank and deposited in the Bryant Park Corporation’s account.

Why not give it to charity instead?

“Well we do!” Mr. Barth said. “We are our own charity.” The corporation is a nonprofit. The money, Mr. Barth said, “goes to the cost of cleaning the fountain” – and barely pays for that.

“The coins pay for the collection of the coins,” he said. “You get your happy feeling and we take nothing off the top.”