ZOOLOGICAL PARKS

ZOOLOGICAL PARKS. Although royal animal collections and popular traveling menageries had existed for centuries, true zoological gardens—organized, permanent exhibitions of animals intended for public education and enjoyment—emerged only in the wake of the Enlightenment, that eighteenth-century intellectual movement celebrating science, reason, and order. The first public animal collections opened in major European cities such as Vienna, Paris, Amsterdam, London, and Berlin during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. In most cases these gardens were established by private zoological societies that believed that their collections would provide scientific interest, natural history instruction, and cultural improvement for their cities' growing bourgeoisie. American zoological gardens took somewhat longer to develop—in part because most antebellum cities lacked the requisite cultural capital to establish major civic institutions, in part because American audiences already enjoyed a number of other sites for live-animal amusement, from itinerant circuses and country fairs to the eclectic museums of Charles Willson Peale and P. T. Barnum. (BARNUM'S AMERICAN MUSEUM in New York also boasted the nation's first public aquarium, opened in 1856.) By the 1860s, though, the attraction of more substantial, permanent, respectable animal gardens had become too compelling for civic-minded American elites to ignore.

The First American Animal Gardens: 1860s–1900s

A few leading zoo boosters explicitly followed the lead of their European predecessors. The Zoological Society of Philadelphia, modeled largely on its London counterpart, was chartered in 1859, though the Civil War postponed the opening of the Society's garden until 1874. The Cincinnati Zoological Garden debuted one year later, drawing its inspiration from the festive animal parks of Germany. Both institutions embraced the twin goals of "instruction and recreation" and proclaimed themselves to be civic institutions of the highest order, allied with the libraries, concert halls, museums, and other cultural attractions of the Gilded Age metropolis. In most American cities, though, zoos developed not as philanthropic endeavors but rather as adjuncts to municipal parks departments. New York's CENTRAL PARK Menagerie appeared in the early 1860s, partly as a result of unsolicited public donations of animals to the city. Chicago's Lincoln Park boasted its own zoo by 1868, with the first inhabitants—a pair of swans—coming from the Central Park Menagerie. By the end of the nineteenth century, over twenty American cities from Baltimore to Boise had opened their own municipal zoos, with most open to the public free of charge. Not surprisingly, these public facilities tended to be more modest affairs than the society-run gardens, but what they lacked in funding they more than made up in popularity, with weekend attendance running into the tens of thousands.

Whether privately or publicly administered, American zoos generally adhered to a common design tradition. Animals were typically housed in barred cages or fenced corrals, often organized taxonomically (all birds together, all cats together) rather than geographically or ecologically. Most exhibition buildings were simple utilitarian shelters, but some parks constructed elaborate animal houses with ornamental features echoing the prevailing architectural styles of the animals' native lands. The grounds of most American zoos covered no more than forty or fifty acres, and while winding paths and ample trees provided a pleasant pastoral atmosphere, little attempt was made at simulating the creatures' natural habitat.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, however, two new facilities pioneered a revolutionary new design model, that of the so-called "zoological park." The National Zoological Park, a branch of the SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, was established by Congress in 1889 as a "city of refuge" for endangered North American species, with only a fraction of its 160 acres to be dedicated to public exhibition. Ten years later the New York Zoological Society opened its park of approximately 261 acres in the Bronx, with similar plans for preserving native fauna. A driving spirit (and the first director) for both parks was William Temple Hornaday, a former chief taxidermist for the Smithsonian, whose outrage at the indiscriminate slaughter of American bison led to a long career promoting wildlife conservation and popular education in natural history. By the early 1900s both zoological parks saw their original conservationist missions fade, as funding difficulties and visitor demand led to the development of more "traditional" zoological collections, stocked not with bison and elk but with elephants and lions. (After 1902, the New York Zoological Society also operated a hugely popular aquarium, first at Castle Garden in Manhattan's Battery Park, later at Coney Island in Brooklyn.) Nevertheless, the more expansive vision of both landscape and mission seen in Washington and the Bronx profoundly influenced future generations of zoo designers and directors.

The Age of Spectacle and Showmanship: 1910s–1950s

A further shift toward naturalistic design came in the early-twentieth century, thanks to the influence of German animal dealer and zoo director Carl Hagenbeck. At his Tierpark near Hamburg, opened in 1907, Hagenbeck oversaw the construction of vast barless enclosures, out-door panoramas that displayed a variety of species in a roughly "natural" landscape of artificial rock, with animals and visitors separated only by strategically hidden moats. While some American zoo directors refused to build such exhibits, citing concerns for the safety of both animals and visitors, several parks in the Midwest and West eagerly adopted the new designs during the interwar years, recognizing their potential for adding drama and spectacle to the zoogoing experience, as well as offering the appearance of freedom for the animals. In Denver, Detroit, St. Louis, San Diego, and the Chicago suburb of Brookfield, zoo visitors gaped at bears, big cats, and hoofed stock exhibited in the open air, with nary a bar or fence in sight.

These dramatic new designs were abetted by an emerging ideal of "showmanship." Needing to compete with a booming mass culture, zoo directors of the 1920s and 1930s developed a variety of new features that emphasized entertainment over education. From trained chimpanzee performances to elephant rides to concerts and restaurants, these added attractions encouraged visitors to see the zoo as a cultural resort. Such attractions were also promoted more professionally and aggressively by more publicity-minded directors like George Vierheller of St. Louis, whose unabashed endorsement of zoos' entertainment value represented a conspicuous change from the more scientific and educational aims of William Temple Hornaday. The popular success of "showmanship" helped zoos to survive the trials of the Great Depression and World War II. At a time when their funding might easily have disappeared, zoos actually managed to secure millions of dollars in government aid, particularly under the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), by presenting themselves as beloved, even essential, elements of their respective communities.

During the postwar years, American zoos continued to enjoy tremendous popularity. Riding the crest of the baby boom, zoos proudly promoted themselves as purveyors of wholesome "family entertainment" that parents and children could delight in together. Dozens of parks opened special "children's zoos" featuring tame, pettable creatures, often displayed in fanciful storybook settings. Lincoln Park's R. Marlin Perkins developed the first zoobased television program, Zoo Parade, in 1949, showcasing his zoo's colorful animal personalities and soon inspiring several imitators. In both of these new arenas, zoo animals symbolically became family pets, neatly domesticated for children's enjoyment.

Reinventing the Zoo: 1960s–1990s

Yet beneath these family-friendly innovations lurked serious financial and philosophical problems, and by the 1960s and 1970s, many zoos had fallen on hard times. Declining urban tax bases forced many cities to decrease their support for municipal zoos, leading to a marked deterioration in the parks' physical plants. When zoos could afford to construct new buildings, they often favored starkly antiseptic enclosures of tiled walls and glass-fronted cages, designed to ensure the animals' health but destined to provoke criticism. Indeed, a growing movement for animal welfare and animal rights increasingly condemned zoos' "naked cages," contrasting them with the lushness and vitality of the animals' natural habitats (habitats familiar to many Americans through popular wildlife documentaries, such as Marlin Perkins's Wild Kingdom). (New commercial competitors provided even more challenges to zoos, as drive-through safari parks and sea-life theme parks provided visitors with more spectacular attractions and better customer service.) All of these developments reinforced a general trend of decreasing attendance at the nation's zoos, and the consequent loss of income and popularity further exacerbated the problems of financing and image. Underfunded and under attack, the American zoo itself appeared to be an endangered species.

Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, zoos rebounded by dramatically altering their identities—physically, philosophically, professionally, and politically. Innovative exhibit designers abandoned cages and moats in favor of "landscape immersion," an exhibition model that used ample vegetation and carefully controlled sightlines to create strikingly realistic replicas of the animals' native habitats. (Improved technology allowed for similarly elaborate, naturalistic exhibits at the score of new American aquariums that opened during the last three decades of the century.) Curators from across the country organized cooperative captive breeding programs, or Species Survival Plans (SSPs), highlighting the zoo's role as a "Noah's ark" for creatures facing extinction in the wild. The American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums (AAZPA)—later renamed the American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA)—became an independent entity in 1972, ending its decades-long association with a municipal-parks organization and gradually reinventing itself as both monitor and promoter of the nation's zoos. Finally, a wave of privatization swept the zoo world, as cash-strapped city governments turned their animal collections over to private zoological societies (which then had to recruit corporate donors and raise admission fees in order to pay the bills).

Yet, while these changes prompted many observers to declare a wholesale "zoo revolution" by the 1990s, the fundamental attraction of zoos remained much the same as it had been nearly a century-and-a-half before: the deep-seated human desire to see active, entertaining, charismatic animals up close and in the flesh. Indeed, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, American zoos were attracting over 130 million visitors a year—a figure greater than the annual attendance at all professional baseball, football, basketball, and hockey games combined. Such astonishing popularity suggests that zoological parks will continue to shape and reflect Americans' ideas of entertainment and education, of civilization and the wild, of people and animals, for many generations to come.

ZOOLOGICAL PARKS

The First American Animal Gardens: 1860s–1900s

The Age of Spectacle and Showmanship: 1910s–1950s

Reinventing the Zoo: 1960s–1990s

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