Story
Bronx Zoo Historical Walking Tour
The Bronx Zoo’s creation was one of the founding objectives of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which began in 1895 as the New York Zoological Society. The zoo opened to the public on November 8, 1899 and was immediately popular: within ten years it had welcomed nearly four million visitors, and it has remained one of New York City’s cultural icons.
In addition to opening a world-class zoo for NYC, WCS was founded to promote the study of zoology and to preserve wildlife in an era when the human impact on nature was increasingly evident. While aspects of those founding objectives have evolved over time, WCS remains committed to saving wildlife and wild places worldwide today through science, conservation action, education, and inspiring people to value nature.
Much about the Bronx Zoo today would be unrecognizable to its first visitors, yet important early features remain—from original structures and an ongoing emphasis on the location’s natural beauty, to its continued focus on fulfilling WCS’s mission.
Since its opening, the Bronx Zoo has been a leader in wildlife conservation, education, exhibitry, and husbandry. Together with WCS’s other three NYC zoos and its New York Aquarium, the Bronx Zoo has educated and inspired more than 400 million visitors, including about a half-million students annually. Today the Bronx Zoo is the Bronx’s largest youth employer, providing opportunity in one of the most underserved communities in the nation. The Bronx Zoo also is the subject of the Animal Planet docuseries THE ZOO.
This tour explores how the early Bronx Zoo embodied WCS’s founding goals and how the evolution of these goals has shaped the park. The tour’s creation was funded by a 2019 Metropolitan Library Council of New York’s User Engagement with Digital Collections grant. This grant is aimed at expanding usage of existing WCS Archives digital collections hosted on METRO’s Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York platform.
Start
17 stops•3.5km•41 min
Bronx River Gate
The Wildlife Conservation Society was founded in 1895 by an act of the New York State legislature. (See our blog for more on this history.) Upon WCS’s establishment, its leaders turned their attention to “founding a zoological park adequate to meet the demands for the education and recreation of the people of this great city”–to no less than, as the Society’s first Annual Report continued, creating an institution that would “appeal to and directly benefit a greater proportion of the three million inhabitants of this city than will any other enterprise that has been undertaken for the higher education or healthful pleasure of our people since the establishment of Central Park itself.” That institution would become the Bronx Zoo. Upon WCS’s founding, New York State allocated city park land above 155th Street for the Society’s use. WCS’s early leaders set to work developing plans for a park of about three hundred acres where animals could be exhibited under conditions similar to their natural habitats.
1
Bronx River
In 1896, the Bronx Zoo’s first director William Hornaday chose South Bronx Park, as this land was then known, as the future location of the Bronx Zoo. (The New York Botanical Garden had been established in the north half of Bronx Park in 1891.) Convenient to nearby elevated trains, South Bronx Park’s unspoiled and varied topography made it an ideal site to gather and display living animals. Describing his first exploration of the park, Hornaday wrote, “\[T]here nature has made a marvelously beautiful and perfect combination of ridge and hollow, glade and meadow, rock, river, lake and virgin forest, and … man has mercifully preserved it all from defacement and destruction.” The fact that the Bronx River ran through the park was among the features that most attracted Hornaday. Approximately 24 miles long, the Bronx River is the only freshwater river in New York City.
2
Current Bison Exhibit
The saving of the American bison from extinction remains one of conservation’s greatest success stories and a shining example of the role zoos can play in saving species.
Bison could be said to be part of WCS’s prehistory. While bison in North America once numbered in the tens of millions, their populations plummeted during the 1800s due to the settlement of the American west. Future Bronx Zoo Director William Hornaday published an 1889 census estimating that the species was nearing extinction, numbering just around 1,000 animals in the wild. In 1905, Hornaday and other WCS members launched the American Bison Society, a national campaign to prevent the bison’s extinction, and in 1907, ABS sent 15 bison from the Bronx Zoo to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. Over the next twenty years, ABS worked to restore bison across the American west, marking the first major wildlife conservation success in US history.
The Bronx Zoo has gone on to help save a wide range of species from extinction, including, in recent history, the Kihansi spray toad, the only amphibian successfully reintroduced after being declared extinct in the wild. In 2005, WCS re-established the American Bison Society to launch an even bolder vision: the cultural and ecological restoration of wild, free-ranging buffalo.
3
Rainey Memorial Gate
One of the Bronx Zoo’s most iconic features, the Rainey Memorial Gate was erected in 1934. It was designed by noted sculptor Paul Manship, who is also known for his Prometheus sculpture at Rockefeller Center. With its animal and plant themes, this 28-ton bronze gate serves as a transition from the city outside to the natural world awaiting visitors within the Bronx Zoo’s grounds. It was designated a New York City landmark in 1967.
Named in honor of Paul G. Rainey, a WCS patron who died in 1923, the gate commemorates Bronx Zoo animals of the era. They include Buster, the Galápagos tortoise; Jimmy, the shoebill stork; and the lion Sultan, who sits atop the gate and who was a favorite of many artists of the era. Although named for Rainey, the gate immortalizes animals who are as central to the Bronx Zoo’s history as its supporters, staff, and visitors.
4
Rockefeller Fountain
The Bronx Zoo opened during the Progressive Era, and its early officials took pride in placing the zoo among other recently opened New York City institutions—such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and the American Museum of Natural History—as a site for “public betterment.” Influenced by the City Beautiful Movement, architects Heins and LaFarge and landscape architect Harold A. Caparn employed neoclassical designs that signaled to visitors the Bronx Zoo’s status as a site of refinement and learning.
To add to the Bronx Zoo’s architectural beauty, early WCS patron William Rockefeller gifted what came to be known as the Rockefeller Fountain. Originally installed in Como, Italy, in 1872, the fountain was admired by Rockefeller during a European tour. He purchased it for $25,000 and had it shipped from Rome to the Bronx Zoo in numbered boxes. Local workers—many of whom were Italian immigrants who had moved to the nearby Belmont neighborhood to take jobs at the Bronx Zoo and The New York Botanical Garden—reassembled the fountain in its first location, just north of the Monkey House by the Sea Lion Pool. It remained in that spot from 1904 to 1910, when it was moved again to its present location, now called Fountain Circle.
5
Jaguar and Reaching Jaguar Sculptures
WCS’s founders saw wildlife art as a vital means of inspiring public interest in animals. As they saw it, the more wildlife art created, “the more interest will the public take in our fauna, and the more will knowledge of it be increased.” The Bronx Zoo offered its animals as the perfect live models for artists, and director Hornaday went out of his way to encourage wildlife artists, from arranging special rates for them at a nearby hotel to including an artists’ studio in the Lion House’s original building design.
The famed sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington was one of many artists to spend dozens of hours within the newly opened Bronx Zoo’s grounds, making extensive first-hand observations of her animal subjects. This included one of the Lion House’s earliest inhabitants, the jaguar known as Señor Lopez. Every day for two months, Huntington sat before Señor Lopez’s enclosure, patiently observing him. In fact, one contemporary newspaper account claimed that, although Señor Lopez had developed a “ferocious” reputation, he became so accustomed to Huntington’s presence that he eventually would approach her when she arrived and chuff—a sort of big cat greeting.
In 1937, stone versions of Huntington’s works Jaguar and Reaching Jaguar, seen here, were installed at the Bronx Zoo. The Metropolitan Museum of Art also holds a bronze version of the pair.
6
Sea Lion Pool
The Sea Lion Pool has been popular with Bronx Zoo visitors since its opening in 1905 on Baird Court—renamed Astor Court in 1989 in recognition of WCS patron Brooke Astor. (This image was taken in 1906, before the Rockefeller Fountain was moved to its present-day spot in 1910.) WCS’s founders predicted that “there is no class of our population to which \[the zoo] will not appeal,” and since opening in 1899 the Bronx Zoo has attracted a diverse visitor audience, both from the New York City area and around the world. The WCS Archives holds an unparalleled collection of records related to the histories of zoos, aquariums, and international wildlife conservation—as documented by WCS’s leadership over its history. At the same time, we recognize that there are voices lacking in WCS’s historical record, including those of our visitors over time. In the coming years, we hope to expand our collection by documenting the history of the Bronx Zoo as experienced by its visitors.
7
Former Bird House
The Bird House opened in 1905 under the direction of the Bronx Zoo’s first Curator of Birds William Beebe. Its design was an attempt to deliver on early WCS leaders’ intentions to create a zoo that would be a “decided advance beyond anything thus far accomplished.” Among the Bird House’s innovations were a ribbed glass roof with panels that could be raised for ventilation, the presence of live plants, and a large interior flying cage that brought together several bird species. Although these features were considered radical at the time, the evolution in zoo design over the course of the twentieth century—as replicated across the zoo’s court—led to WCS’s view by the late 1950s that the Bird House was outdated. In 1972, the Bronx Zoo opened the World of Birds to replace the Bird House, and today the Bird House holds staff offices.
Beebe’s own career also reflects a twentieth-century evolution in zoology. In the early 1900s, the study of animals was largely performed in museum collections, among preserved specimens. Beebe was among a new wave of naturalists who wanted to study wildlife where it lived. Helping to initiate the field of ecology, Beebe began WCS’s Department of Tropical Research in the 1910s, leaving the Bird House to conduct ecological expeditions across the tropics. His reliance on close, first-hand studies of animals in their natural habitats laid the foundation for field biology both within WCS—the Department of Tropical Research is a precursor to today’s Global Conservation Program—and beyond.
8
Lion House
To encourage the creation of animal art—which WCS’s founders saw as a vital means of inspiring public interest in wildlife—the Bronx Zoo built an artists’ studio into the original plans for the Lion House. Located in the northeast corner of the building, the studio contained a workspace and a large wire-fronted enclosure into which animals were transferred by means of a mobile shift cage, which ran on tracks along the length of the building.
Perhaps most popular among artists of the early Bronx Zoo animals was Sultan, one of the Lion House’s first inhabitants, shown here in what is thought to be the artists’ studio enclosure. Sultan was believed to be a Barbary lion, a population that is regionally extinct today. His beauty was sanctified in artworks by Anna Hyatt Huntington, Charles Knight, and Charles Rungius, and it is Sultan whom sculptor Paul Manship placed atop the Rainey Gate.
9
Lion House
Like many early Bronx Zoo buildings, the Lion House was designed to deliver on WCS’s founding mission to promote the study of zoology. To turn-of-the-century zoo leaders, this meant organizing the animals taxonomically—so that lions, tigers, snow leopards, jaguars, leopards, and cheetahs were all located in the Lion House—a practice standard in zoos at that time. As with many other zoos of the era, this also often meant keeping animals in enclosures with sparse features, lest they inhibit the visitor’s ability to view and properly study the animals.
The period between the Lion House’s opening in 1903 and today has brought an evolution of zoo exhibitry, fueled by new understandings about animals and the natural world as well as technological advances. This evolution is physically evident in what visitors encounter when they visit the Lion House today. Although the exterior of the Lion House—a landmarked structure, along with Astor Court’s other buildings—looks much as it did in 1903, the inside has been completely transformed. New York City’s first LEED-certified historic landmark, the “green” building is now home to the Madagascar! exhibit, featuring wildlife endemic to the island nation in naturalistic settings, while describing the on-the-ground work that WCS has done since the 1990s to save Madagascar’s wildlife and wild places.
10
Zoo Center (formerly the Elephant House)
Known since 1989 as the Keith W. Johnson Zoo Center, the Elephant House opened in 1908. It was the final animal building to open on Astor Court, or Baird Court as it was then known. The Elephant House was designed as the southern terminus of the court, which stretches north to the grand stairways that lead to Fountain Circle. Today, Astor Court stands as one of the few intact ensembles in New York City realized according to City Beautiful ideals. It was designated a New York City Landmark in 2000.
The architects Heins and LaFarge designed the court in consultation with early WCS officials, and its Beaux Arts style—marked by heavily ornamented buildings that reflected the animal inhabitants within—was influenced by the Court of Honor at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. While WCS’s leaders wanted the court’s refined style to reflect the society’s commitment to learning and culture, they were also dedicated to maintaining the natural landscape throughout the rest of the park. This distinct balance between built and natural environments is still evident at the Bronx Zoo today.
The Bronx Zoo’s first director William Hornaday predicted that the Elephant House “would render good service for at least two centuries,” and the building’s landmarked status will ensure that Hornaday’s prediction is technically true. Yet evolving understandings of animals since its construction—accompanied by evolving zoo exhibitry—mean that, like all of the court’s animal buildings, today’s Zoo Center is a very different space. Originally designed to house elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and tapirs, Zoo Center is now home to two southern white rhinoceroses, Komodo dragons, and Aldabra tortoises.
11
Monkey House
The first animal house on Astor Court to be completed, the Monkey House (sometimes also known as the Primates House) opened in 1901. Like several other early Bronx Zoo buildings, the Monkey House features animal sculptures by A. P. Proctor, who also worked on the Bird House, the Reptile House, and the south side of the Elephant House. Other renowned wildlife artists of the era contributed to the Bronx Zoo’s architecture, including Charles Knight, who did the sculpture on the Elephant House’s north side, and Eli Harvey, whose work adorns the Lion House.
Contrary to the way zoo exhibits are designed today, early Bronx Zoo exhibits like the Monkey House were built very much with the visitors’ needs, rather than the animals’ needs, in mind. In part, this was done in the name of science, and specifically, to allow the Bronx Zoo to deliver on WCS’s founding mission to promote the study of zoology—which officials at the time interpreted as the need to provide visitors with clear, unimpeded views of animals. At the same time, it is science, and particularly more knowledge about animals and their needs, that has motivated the evolution of zoo design, leading to the Monkey House’s renovation in 1950, the opening of the Great Apes House also in that year, and the Monkey House’s closure in 2012.
12
Former Heads and Horns Museum
Opened in 1922, the Heads and Horns Museum was originally constructed as a gallery to display big game trophies of animals such as mountain sheep, rhinoceroses, elephants, and giraffes. While today the idea of a zoo displaying taxidermied animals may seem surprising, early Bronx Zoo officials—many of whom were big game hunters themselves—saw the display as a powerful means of educating visitors about the dwindling populations of wild animals. They suggested that if protections were not enacted to help these species, these mounted specimens would eventually be the only forms in which humans could encounter them. As etched on its façade, the building was dedicated “in memory of the vanishing big game of the world.”
As times changed, so did the Bronx Zoo’s means of educating visitors about threats to wildlife and the importance of conservation. The National Collection of Heads and Horns was dispersed to other institutions, and by the 1940s, the museum was increasingly used for art exhibitions. Today the building is still dedicated to conservation education: it is home to WCS’s Education Department, which seeks to inspire a diverse, inclusive movement of conservation advocates by sparking connections with animals and nature; enhancing scientific literacy through hands-on investigation; and engaging constituents in stewardship and action to conserve wildlife and wild places.
13
Former Site of the Great Apes House
\[The Great Apes House was located on the site of what is now the Butterfly Garden. If you are walking this tour, we recommend skipping this stop now and locating it later as your time permits.]\*
In 1950, the Great Apes House opened on the site of today’s Butterfly Garden. While it offered its gorillas, orangutans, and other primates more space than their previous home in the Monkey House—the postcard shown here is captioned “Plenty of room for the gorillas”—the Great Apes House became outdated over the following decades as knowledge about animals’ native habitats and their needs increased. This change in thinking was brought about by field biologists such as George Schaller. Funded by WCS, Schaller’s 1959-1960 studies in Central Africa brought about new understandings of mountain gorillas, including their ecology, behavior, and the threats they faced. The research of Schaller and other WCS staff from both the Bronx Zoo and the global field program was instrumental in the construction of the Congo Gorilla Forest exhibit, which opened at the Bronx Zoo in 1999. This award-winning exhibit was also the first major zoo exhibit to involve the zoo-goer directly with wildlife conservation in Africa, by giving visitors the ability to contribute their exhibit admission fee to conservation projects designed to protect the species it exhibited. To date, visitors to the Bronx Zoo’s Congo Gorilla Forest have raised over 15 million dollars.
14
Former Site of the Bronx River Boat House (now Jungleworld)
\[The Boat House was located on part of the site that is now JungleWorld. If you are walking this tour, we recommend skipping this stop now and locating it later as your time permits.]
In addition to serving as a resource for waterfowl and native mammals, Hornaday noted that the Bronx River—and particularly the areas where dams had created large bodies of still water—was an excellent spot for boating. In 1907, the Bronx Zoo opened its Boat House, offering boat rentals, a restaurant, and a soda fountain. It immediately became a popular attraction, with nearly 10,000 visitors in the first year taking rowboats out to experience the park’s beauty from the river. The Boat House was torn down in 1963. Today, JungleWorld sits near the site of the Boat House; visitors to JungleWorld cross an outside terrace overlooking the Bronx River.
15
African Plains
\[If you are walking this tour, we recommend skipping this stop now and locating it later as your time permits.]
The opening of the African Plains in 1941 marked a turning point in Bronx Zoo exhibit design. Whereas the grand early Bronx Zoo exhibits were organized taxonomically—think, for example, of the Lion House—the African Plains brought together animals based on geography, and it placed them in a naturalistic setting. “It is the beginning of the end of exhibiting our animal collections behind bars,” WCS President Fairfield Osborn told WCS members. Other zoos had experimented earlier with the African Plains’ style of naturalistic, bar-less enclosures, but what was pioneering about the African Plains was its intention to display the ecological relationships among animals and their natural environments. Showing this ecological interdependence was central to Osborn’s vision for the Bronx Zoo. A leading conservationist of the period, Osborn saw the African Plains exhibit as an educational tool for making the public aware of the need to protect not only wildlife but also the places in which they lived. This ecological vision has continued to guide the Bronx Zoo’s design, and it can be seen in such subsequent exhibits as Wild Asia, JungleWorld, Congo Gorilla Forest, and Madagascar!.
16
African Plains
\[The former bison exhibit was located on the site of what is now the African Plains. If you are walking this tour, we recommend skipping this stop now and locating it later as your time permits.]\*
When the Bronx Zoo opened in 1899, the bison exhibit was an approximately 0.5-acre lot located on the present site of the African Plains, with an additional breeding range in the site of today’s Asia Parking Lot. At that time, what is at today’s bison exhibit was a 5.5-acre lake called Lake Agassiz. In 1971, the Bronx Zoo opened today’s 3-acre bison exhibit by filling in part of Lake Agassiz. This expansion of the current exhibit to six times its former size reflects a philosophical movement in zoo exhibitry over the twentieth century. When the new exhibit opened, it was reported that the herd “exuberantly entered the large, well-grassed area, and even the elderly animals bucked and gamboled like calves.”
17