J.D. Porter's Blog, page 11

Good Sized Zoo for the City of Tampa

[image error]“Snakes and Alligators Flourish at Tampa Zoo”, screamed the headline. Flourish would seem an understatement when you consider that the Sulphur Springs zoo in Tampa, Florida was reporting the birth of thirty-four diamondback rattlesnakes and the “setting” of two hundred alligator eggs—in September 1914.

ZooTampa at Lowry Park traces its founding to 1957, but that is not the beginning of Tampa’s zoo story—not by a long shot. That is not even the beginning of the Lowry Park zoo part of the story.

Tampa’s colorful history with zoos began shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. According to that September 1914 article, zoo manager C. M. Stokes also boasted about having a “big bear”, several llamas, a deer, some guinea pigs and birds. The next year, Mr. Stokes reportedly asked the City’s Board of Public Works for permission to move his animals downtown to Plant Park and open a free zoo. There is no record as to whether they took him up on his offer.

[image error]A decade later, in November 1925, the Tampa zoo story continues with this unlikely headline, “Proprietor of Zoo Taken into Custody Under Liquor Charge”. It seems that a zoo at Rocky Point on Memorial Highway was raided by prohibition agents because of its illegal brewery and the forty barrels of beer that were stored there.

Interest in forming a zoo in Tampa continued in 1926 when the Lions Club suggested the city build a zoo at Ballast Point and again when local politician Sumter L. Lowry, Sr. included the promise of a zoo in his campaign for re-election to the Tampa City Commission. Lowry’s campaign advertisement he said he wanted a “bigger and progressive Tampa” and he pledged to improve the city’s parks by adding a municipal golf course and a municipal zoo.

Lowry was true to his word because the next year, a “new monkey house” was being built for Tampa’s first municipal zoo and the city commission announced plans to purchase eight monkeys. The new zoo was located, appropriately enough, in the park that bore Lowry’s name. Community support, however, may have been called into question when someone quipped in the newspaper that “They won’t have to go outside the city hall for one or two of [the monkeys].”

But on January 11th, 1928 the newspaper reported that the city commission halted plans for the zoo to investigate $628 in unauthorized animal purchases. Due to a mix-up in the city’s approval process (for which Lowry took responsibility) the city refused to pay the bill for the monkeys and rare tropical birds. The animals were returned and by March 6th, plans for the municipal zoo in Lowry Park had been abandoned. It would be another thirty years before the Lowry Park zoo story would continue.

Serious discussions about a zoo in Tampa resumed in April 1957 when a citizen’s organization began pushing for the development of the downtown riverfront with plans that would include a museum, a planetarium, and a zoo. On November 15th of that year, the Chamber of Commerce decried Tampa’s run down and inadequate central library and the city’s “non-existent” zoo. And on October 31st, Anheuser Busch further confused the issue of a municipal zoo when it announced plans to build its own zoo at Busch Gardens. This caused some taxpayers to ask the city to save its money and cut funding for the municipal zoo.

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Fortunately, Mayor Nick Nuccio’s “pride and joy” was the new Fairyland at Lowry Park. Although the only animals in the park at that time were the ones that supported the fairy tale theme—namely geese, pigs, sheep, chickens, and mice—the Mayor announced plans in December 1957 to purchase a couple of seals from the city of San Francisco, allowing the park “to take on the appearance of a good-sized zoo”.

 

On May 4th, 1958, the zoo received a donation of a lion cub named Penny and already had a chimpanzee that was yet to be named. On July 3rd of that year, officials from the nearby city of St. Petersburg came to inspect the Lowry Park zoo, saying they “want a zoo like Tampa’s”. By that time the zoo had grown to include seals, lions, a chimpanzee, deer, rare birds, bears, and penguins. Their visit was hosted by Mayor Nick Nuccio as a preview of what he called the new Fairyland Park zoo which opened to the public the next day.

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The city of Tampa finally had what could legitimately be called “a good-sized zoo”. But was it a zoo of which the residents might be proud? Like most American zoos in the 1960s, Tampa’s municipal zoo struggled to compete for funding. Scarce tax dollars were carefully prioritized, first for public safety, then for public utilities, and finally, for non-necessities—like the zoo. Most people saw nothing wrong with keeping animals in small cages for their amusement, but that was about to change.

Two letters to the editor of the newspaper in October 1971 may offer a glimpse into reasons for the changes that lie ahead. One writer suggested that by allowing children to enjoy seeing animals in “too-small cages” was teaching them “inhumanity”. The writer called the zoo disgraceful and contended that “if the zoo can’t be kept right, it should not be kept at all”. Another writer said that it was heartbreaking to see the animals “in the conditions they are in at this so-called park”.

“Oh, please,” pleads the writer, “get Mayor Greco to get all the animals out of Lowry Park.”

That next year, in June 1972, an article appeared in the St. Petersburg Times Sunday magazine titled New Zoos for Everyone, Bar None. In it, the writer describes the Lowry Park zoo’s cages as being “dilapidated and prison-like” and he stated that Lowry Park, like smaller zoos, was making no attempt to improve. The writer suggested people were demanding that zoos adapt to meet “modern needs” but he optimistically suggested that the prognosis for the survival of zoos was good.

[image error]I saved that article because I was interviewed for it. I was a twenty-two-year-old zoology student at the University of South Florida who was preparing for a career in zoo management by working as a zookeeper at Busch Gardens. My belief at the time, as revealed in the interview, was that zoos could transform themselves from menageries into relevant institutions in American society. I am glad I was correct. I only wish it hadn’t taken more than a decade for me to circle back to Lowry Park and have an impact on the well-being of its residents.

 

Next week: Bringing Down the Bars

 

An Opening Day to … Forget?

I have long puzzled over why I have no recollection of the August 15, 1974, opening day of the new Metro Toronto Zoo. It was the day we had all been working toward, and yet, it is as though I was never there. Then, as I looked back at my diary and notes, it hit me. I was too busy working.

In the days leading up to the grand opening, I was a senior keeper in the Americas section of the zoo. This included an indoor pavilion, a large polar bear complex with underwater viewing, and a South America paddock. The pavilion was largely underground, and it held the most diverse collection of animals a senior zookeeper could be expected to care for, including mammals (beavers, otters, cacomistles, and more), birds (band-tailed pigeons, native songbirds, waterfowl), reptiles (alligators, rattlesnakes), and fishes. In the days and weeks leading up to opening, and especially on opening day itself, we were still frantically preparing exhibits and receiving animals.

Most of the animals had been quarantined and stockpiled at barns and holding facilities all over the area. From mid-July right through opening day, animals poured into my area—a pair of cacomistles and a jaguarondi from the Claremont Barn, six armadillos from the south service building. a Mississauga rattlesnake that was donated and eight alligators from the Riverdale Zoo. We received three skunks, fourteen quail of three different species from Kirkham’s Barn, two fox snakes, seven box turtles, and a diamond-backed terrapin. a huge alligator, eighteen songbirds, and an otter. We were scrambling to get animals introduced to their new accommodations and to each other. And when opening day came and went, our challenges continued.

A few days after the grand opening, for example, we received nine prairie dogs, and as soon as they were released into their outdoor space, they promptly did what prairie dogs do—they dug holes and disappeared underground. Unfortunately, that was the last we saw of them for a while. My notes reflect our concern for their well-being. A week after their release, it was noted that the prairie dogs had not been seen, nor were they coming out to eat. We watched and waited, but finally, a month  later, we could wait no longer. We dug them up. We could only find five of them, but they were all asleep–apparently hibernating in anticipation of the coming winter.

The last notation in my diary about the Riverdale Zoo was when we transferred six polar bears to the new exhibit on October 17. This transfer included the two males, Amos and Andy. These bears were, as I recall, more than twenty years old, and they did not adapt well to their spacious new home. After being introduced to the new exhibit, they fell into the dry moats that served as invisible barriers three times over their first few days.

 

[image error]If I kept diaries after 1974, they are lost. I do recall being assigned to a new area known as the Canadian Domain. This period was one of the most event-filled times at the zoo, but one of my least well documented. The Domain opened in 1976 and occupied several hundred acres of the Rouge River valley section of the property. Animals were in large naturalistic areas and were viewed by a futuristic, electric monorail train.

We developed areas for bison and pronghorn, moose and elk, white-tailed and mule deer, grizzly bears, and wolves. We even fenced in a rocky cliff for a herd of white big-horned sheep known as Dahl’s sheep. Accessing this remote area was challenging. We drove four-wheel-drive trucks, and when heavy snow built up, we even had snowmobiles.

[image error]My memories of those years are like faded images from an old album. I do recall:

The white-tailed deer named Patricia that had been hand-raised and remained tame enough to pet like a dog, but the babies she bore every spring remained as wild as march-hares.
The pronghorn that were captured in Alberta as infants and hand-raised but were barely tame enough to approach.
The herd of plains bison that had to be captured out of a five-acre pen and shipped out to make room for a new herd of wood bison from western Canada.
The two zookeepers that I had to write-up with disciplinary reports because they cracked the windshield of their truck while playfully tossing frozen bison turds at each other.

 

When the Metro Toronto Zoo opened its 710-acre “zoogeographic” zoo, organized around groups of animals from the same parts of the world, it may have appeared to be in line with world-wide trends, but it was, in fact, ahead of its time. It would be another ten years before other zoos began to catch up with Toronto by opening large indoor facilities like the Bronx zoo’s Jungle World the Brookfield zoo’s Tropic World. No other zoo took the zoogeographic theme to the level of the Toronto Zoo, with its huge continental areas of Indo-Malaya, Africa, the Americas, and Eurasia. Each area had an indoor pavilion that was a combination zoo, aquarium, museum, and botanical garden.

Michael Robinson, director of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo for sixteen years in the 1980s and 1990s, was an advocate for the concept of the BioPark, a place that would combine elements of existing zoos, aquariums, natural history museums, and botanical gardens. Robinson, it might be said, was ahead of his time in predicting what the modern zoo strives to be. Few zoos have reached that goal. The Toronto zoo is one that did—nearly fifty years ago.

 

Next month: We will begin our look at a Good Sized Zoo in the Sunshine State.

Retracing the Route of the Titanic

[image error]One of the more intimidating experiences of my life was standing on the deck of the Polish freighter Zawiercie at the docks of Bremerhaven, Germany on the afternoon of June 8th, 1974. The city Bremerhaven is in Northwestern Germany on an estuary that connects directly into the North Sea. It is one of the largest container ports in the world and was, as I recall, a major operation in those days as well.

The Zawiercie would be my home for the next two weeks as we chugged across the North Atlantic in route to the port of Montreal. I may have been retracing the route of the Titanic, but this was no ocean cruise. I was receiving hurried and cursory instructions on how to care for my cargo of twenty animals that were being loaded on deck and secured under my watchful, though inexperienced, eye. I was no stranger to the ins and outs of cleaning cages and feeding animals, but animals in crates on the deck of a ship on the open ocean was another matter. What had I gotten myself into?

Stocking a major zoo with the thousands of animals that would be needed to fill the exhibits meant hundreds of shipments arriving in Toronto from all over the world. Animals from North America could arrive by truck while smaller animals from overseas could fly into Toronto’s international airport. But the larger animals from Europe and Asia were transported by ocean-going freighters. It was an age-old method of transport (one that is seldom used today) and one that required a caretaker for the long voyage. That is where I came in.

Fortunately, Toronto Zoo officials saw value in having me visit some European zoos while I was over there, so my journey actually began a week earlier when my flight landed in Amsterdam on the morning of June 1st, 1974. It was a whirlwind tour of six zoos in six cities, traveling on two planes, four buses, five trains, and seven taxis. And what did I learn on this tour of European zoos? Not as much as I should have. Too much of my time was spent being in awe of the whole experience.

I did learn that a zoo doesn’t need to be large to be good. The Antwerp Zoo, for example, is located in the heart of downtown, next to the train station and right on the town square. It was, according to my notes, an “excellent zoo. small & ‘comfortable’”. It had a large, impressive collection of animals, including two breeding pairs of mountain gorillas, a natural history museum, an aquarium building, a nocturnal house, and a birdhouse that used an innovative system to contain the birds. The cages were brightly lit and the hallways, where the people stood, were darkened with no barrier between. The birds chose to remain in the light and seldom ventured out into the public area. It was innovative enough to have been named after the zoo—the Antwerp Cage System.

The Frankfurt Zoo was an “excellent zoo. displays & exhibits always imaginative & enjoyable.” I was especially taken with the bird house and a building called the Exotarium that housed a variety of animals including penguins in a simulated ice environment, a twenty-year-old colony of umbrella ants that farm their own fungus, and a very imaginative “tropical landscape with huge fish below water and plants, turtles, and birds above”. The Japanese giant salamander lived in an aquarium at the bottom of a gentle waterfall that receded far back into a long, narrow space giving such an illusion of a natural setting that I stopped for a long while to marvel at it.

My next stop was at a small zoo in Gelsenkierken. It was primarily a holding compound for the animal dealer, Mr. Hermann Ruhe, who was supplying our animals. Soon after I arrived, I was handed a cable from Dr. Voss back in Toronto. It said, “camels for Toronto must have standing humps as per agreement with importer. Therefore inspect carefully. You are entitled to reject unsatisfactory specimens. If in doubt, telephone Mr. Cahill or me. greetings Voss”. The possibility of a confrontation with the legendary animal dealer over my opinion of camel humps was, to say the least, disconcerting.

My final two stops were in Hanover and Hamburg. I toured the Hanover Zoo in the rain, but it was an “outstanding zoo for my favorites—African antelope & elephants”. Hagenbeck’s Tierpark in Hamburg was one of the pioneers in the use of hidden moats to create natural vistas and panoramas with predators and prey in the same view.

On the morning of Saturday, June 8th, I boarded the ship, dropped my suitcase in a small room with a bed that would prove way too short for my six foot eight inch frame, and observed the loading process. By 4:30 PM, my consignment of twenty animals had been loaded: 2 Siberian tigers, 2 Sarus cranes, 6 Bactrian camels, and 10 assorted hoofed animals.

[image error]All the animals were in crates that were lashed securely to the deck near the rear of the ship. The camels, however, were not in crates. They were in pens that had been constructed on each side of the central hatch opening, three animals to a pen. I was given hurried instructions that covered cleaning and feeding by the man who had delivered the animals to the dock.

I considered Monday, June 10th to be the first day of the journey, even though we had been on-board since Saturday, because this was the day we set sail at 6:30 PM. The day was not without its drama, however. It turns out we were scheduled to stop in Rouen, France and, because of quarantine restrictions and our animal health certificates, we had to get permission from the Canadian government to stop there.

[image error]The hoofed animals were in wooden crates that had a lift-up sliding door at the front end and back end. Each door had two nails side by side, one nail in the door and one nail in the crate, with a one-foot long piece of wire tied to each nail. This allowed the doors to slide open about a foot for feeding at the front end and raking out manure at the other, while preventing the animal from raising the door enough to escape.

The crossing was largely uneventful. About two thirds of the way across the Atlantic, our pace slowed to a crawl because we were in iceberg territory. When the weather cleared, we did see some impressive icebergs in the distance. The next day, we chugged out of the iceberg zone in and into a fog so thick we couldn’t even see the bow of the ship. Late in the day however, we broke out of the fog and the southern coast of Newfoundland came into view. We were nearly home.

[image error]On day 14—Sunday, June 23rd, I awoke to a still, silent ship for the first time in nearly two weeks. The engines had been shut down during the night when we docked at Montreal. The docks were quiet on Sunday and again on Monday for the St. Jean Baptiste Holiday in Quebec. On Tuesday morning, all animals were unloaded by noon—but my problems were not over. The import permit for the Sarus cranes had the wrong date, and we had more camels than had been permitted. We finally got it all worked out and sent the tigers to Granby, Quebec, the hoofed stock to the quarantine station at Levis, Quebec, and began the drive from Montreal to Toronto. We had a zoo to open.

 

Next week: An Opening Day to … Forget?

Kicked, Bitten, and Head Butted

[image error]In September 1973, I quit my job at Busch Gardens and drove nearly 1,500 miles pulling a packed, twelve-foot U-Haul cargo trailer behind my 1970 Chrysler 300. It took two days with my brother Danny sharing the driving duties, so when I pulled into the parking lot of the Metro Toronto Zoo’s South Service Building on an overcast, chilly September evening, I was horrified to discover that Lawrence Cahill, the zoo’s director of animal operations—and my new boss—was not only not expecting me, he had no idea who I was.

It seems that Dr. Voss, the man who had interviewed me, sent me the letter confirming the job offer, and facilitated my securing Canada’s Landed Immigrant status, had neglected to pass any of that information to Mr. Cahill. After some anxious moments waiting in the car with my brother and thinking about the long drive we were about to make back to Tampa, Mr. Cahill came out to welcome me to Toronto.

[image error]I was one of a few Americans on a team of zookeepers from Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Australia, and other parts of the world. I doubt there has ever been a more talented, diverse, and eccentric group of zookeepers assembled anywhere on the planet than those who came together to open the Metro Toronto Zoo. We endured primitive working conditions, low pay, harsh winters, and injuries from wild animals. But the results, at least from my vantage point nearly half a century later, were so worth it.

[image error]Opening an enormous zoo with thousands of animals was a complex undertaking. With animals arriving daily and their permanent homes still under construction, zoo officials rented holding barns all over the region. Conditions were often alarmingly makeshift. In the facility across the street from the zoo known as the “Main Barn,” for example, we held two polar bear cubs. They were in adjacent pens with no shift doors. In order to clean their pens, we had to transfer them out into a nearby hallway, utilizing plywood shields for protection. These animals were nearly a year old and probably over a hundred pounds each. The process went from exciting to dangerous when the bears became large enough to snatch the shields out of our hands. We were glad when our overworked maintenance crew finally found the time to install some shift doors.

We had a few animal holding spaces on the property, but not nearly enough to accommodate the growing collection. So on most mornings, zookeepers would strike out in trucks, cars, and even tractors, heading for the temporary holding areas that dotted the countryside—places like the Finch barn, the Johnson barn, the Sedgwick barn, and the old pig farm more than twenty kilometers away in Claremont. We dealt with icy, treacherous winter roads; isolated, lonely locations; and challenging animal medical conditions. We were kicked, bitten, and head-butted, and at the end of the day, we gathered at the Glen Eagles Pub to laugh at our tribulations.

We regularly received and had to care for animals that we had not only never worked with, in many cases we had never even heard of them. Two days before Christmas 1973, for example, we received a male jaguarondi from Mexico City. The jaguarondi, as we would learn from hours spent in the zoo library, is a member of the cat family that looks more like a weasel than a cat. About twice the size of a large house cat, its body is slender, and it comes in a couple of color phases: brownish gray and reddish brown. The jaguarondi once ranged throughout southern Texas and southeastern Arizona and along both coasts of Mexico south into Central and South America. Its habits in the wild had not been well documented at that time. Although an agile climber, the jaguarondi is most active in the daytime (diurnal), and prefers to forage on the ground, stalking birds and small mammals in brush and scrub.

Two weeks later, we were back in the library—this time trying to figure out how to care for a pair of cacomistles we were about to receive from Sacramento, California. The cacomistle is a small mammal that is related to the raccoon. Also known as the ringtail or ring-tailed cat, it is found in western North America and south through Mexico and parts of Central America. It is about the size of a large squirrel, with a pointed, fox-like face, and a brown-and-white ringed tail. Cacomistles, we learned, are swift, agile climbers, that are nocturnal and feed primarily on small animals, but also eat some vegetable matter.

We had to do a great deal of research as we figured out what to feed the animals and how to arrange their temporary quarters as the list of mysterious new arrivals continued to grow–aardvarks, tree shrews, West Caucasian tur, Himalayan tahr, pigmy hippo, and kusimanse. But even the familiar animals had a way of surprising us.

 

 

Opening the crate of a newly arrived animal at a zoo is always a tense moment. You never know whether the animal will walk out calmly, refuse to come out at all, or come flying out like the human cannonball at the circus. That is why I was nervous and excited at the same time. I didn’t know what to expect. My partner and I had just returned to the zoo late one evening from the airport. Our job had been to pick up two wooden crates from an international flight, return to the zoo, and uncrate the animals. We were to give them some food and water and, if they appeared healthy, leave them for the night. The veterinarians would give them a thorough exam in the morning.

I sat cross-legged in a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot holding stall in the Toronto Zoo’s quarantine building. The heavy bedding of wood shavings and straw was both comfortable to sit in and soothing in its scent of fresh pine. I lifted the crate’s sliding door out of its track, laid it on top of the wooden crate, and settled a few feet from the opening, peering into the darkness. My plan was to sit quietly and wait for the baby gorilla to emerge.

While my partner was down the hall with his own crate, I sat cross-legged in a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot holding stall in the Toronto Zoo’s quarantine building. The heavy bedding of wood shavings and straw was both comfortable to sit in and soothing in its scent of fresh pine. I lifted the crate’s sliding door out of its track, laid it on top of the wooden crate, and settled a few feet from the opening, peering into the darkness of the small box. My plan was to sit quietly and wait for the baby gorilla to emerge.

We sat staring at each other for a long time. He had settled with his back at the far end of the crate, glancing at me without making direct eye contact. He was thirty pounds of black fur and dark eyes, clearly frightened, and unsure of what to do next. As I was about to give up and leave him to explore after I left, he stirred and walked calmly out of the crate and into my lap. He smelled earthy—a combination of freshly turned soil and over-ripe fruit.

I wanted to comfort the little guy and welcome him to his new home. I knew he would be safe and well cared for, with the best food, other gorillas for companionship, and modern veterinary care. It would be some time before I learned the real story of how baby gorillas came to be at the zoo. For now, I just wrapped my arms around him as I would one of my own sons.

We sat for a few seconds, with him in my lap facing away from me, and then, in slow motion, he placed his mouth over my bare right forearm and bit down—hard. So hard, in fact, that I hollered in pain and jerked my arm away. I pushed him out of my lap as gently as I could under the painful circumstances, left the pen to examine my injury, and headed home for the night. I had to prepare for the next big animal shipment—a shipment of intimidating proportions in which I would play a central role.

 

Next week: Retracing the Route of the Titanic

Toronto’s Riverdale Zoo – a social infrastructure lost

[image error]Torrential rain had rendered the site all but impassable when I first visited the new Metro Toronto Zoo in June 1973. For my interview tour, we were forced to navigate long runways of planks and plywood over thick, oozing, boot-sucking mud in order to move around the various construction sites that dotted this massive project. I had come from Busch Gardens in Tampa, so I was accustomed to “big,” but this was big on a different scale. It was not just wide-open spaces, but a series of immense pavilions, each with a unique design that would one day immerse zoo-goers in a lush, zoogeographic landscape of plants and animals.

[image error]By that time, Toronto’s old zoo at Riverdale park was little more than an animal holding facility. It was being closed and many of the cages had been abandoned. The Riverdale zoo’s first animals went on display in 1899 in conditions that were typical of zoos in this era. Animals were kept in cages and pens that were much too small but afforded the best views for visitors. By March of 1902, the inventory included ocelots, a camel, a buffalo, six pens of monkeys, a Siberian bear, and more. The Toronto Star reported on the pending arrival of an elephant and a couple of lions.

Conditions improved at the zoo over the decades, but by the 1960s, the small cages and concrete outdoor runs were hopelessly out of date. Upon completion of the new Metropolitan Toronto Zoo in August 1974, the old Riverdale zoo closed and most of the buildings were eventually torn down. Riverdale Farm, the successor to the zoo, opened in 1978, specializing in rare breeds of farm animals.

In his recent book Palaces for the People, author Eric Klinenberg suggests that parks—and, I would argue, zoos—are part of a community’s social infrastructure. They are the glue that binds communities together and the spaces that shape the way we interact. The Riverdale Zoo was an element of Toronto’s social infrastructure in the Cabbagetown neighborhood for seventy-five years. It was a place that allowed Torontonians to interact with one another while building relationships and memories.

It seems sad to me that while many zoos around North America celebrate one hundred years of history, the Toronto zoo’s first seventy-five years have disappeared. Although the animals were better off being moved, a rich history has been lost to the ages. I am also struck by how eerily similar the history of the Toronto zoo (one of my 1st zoos) is to my final zoo in Albany, Georgia. The Riverdale zoo and the Tift Park zoo, separated by two thousand miles and a national border, share similar stories of an old zoo that vanishes while a new one is born in another part of town.

In October 1977, when I was working at Toronto’s new zoo, Albany, Georgia was also closing its zoo and transferring animals to more spacious quarters. Albany’s Tift Park was founded in 1909, a few years after the Riverdale zoo opened, and the Tift Park zoo sprang up sometime in the 1930s. In the late 1960s, residents of both Toronto and Albany were becoming uneasy with their aging zoos. Closing them down seemed the best option.

[image error]The Menagerie: A Zoo Story    Now Available

A wonderfully written story.  Symbiosis, the Journal of the Association of Zoo and Aquarium Docents

One of the most original pieces that I have read. [It] changed how I view zoos and has given me a new found respect for the work that goes on to keep them afloat.  Online Book Club

 

[image error]Though I had little contact with Toronto’s Riverdale Zoo and have forgotten much of what was there, I do recall the old polar bear enclosure. It was about fifty or sixty square feet with a concrete floor that was mostly taken up by a large, circular pool. Its heavy iron bars reached a height of ten or twelve feet, and since it was open-topped, the bars curled inward at the top in an upside-down U-shape that terminated in sharp tips. I don’t know when it was constructed, but I have seen a photograph of the exhibit with two cubs in residence and the date “May 25, 1926” scrawled across the bottom.

Zoo animal collections in those days were what we might call “postage stamp” collections. Zoo directors took pride in having one or two of every kind of animal they could get their hands on—with little thought to animal welfare or humane treatment.

In the1970s and 1980s, we were learning about animals in their natural habitats from field biologists like Jane Goodall and from documentary television programs like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Governments were passing legislation to protect wild animals and wild places as zoos created education departments and explored new concepts in animal exhibit design.

The renaissance of zoos during this period usually took one of two paths. Many communities found ways to adapt and expand on their current sites. Some, however, considered it preferable to move their zoo to more spacious property. That meant simply closing the old zoo (like Riverdale and Tift Park) and doing away with the old cages.

In Albany, having a state park with hundreds of acres of wooded property a couple of miles down the road probably made the move of the zoo a foregone conclusion. The City of Toronto was on a similar trajectory that launched in 1963 when city leader Hugh Crothers was shocked enough by poor conditions to convince the city to build a new zoo. He was elected as the first chair of the new Metro Toronto Zoological Society when it was formed in 1966. A site-selection study was completed in 1967, and the Glen Rouge area of Scarborough was selected. Owned at the time by the Metropolitan Toronto & Region Conservation Authority, the site consisted of 125 hectares (310 acres) of tableland and 162 hectares (400 acres) of forest in the Rouge River Valley. The task of creating a world-class zoo brought into play the talents of many people and more than twenty million dollars in funding. In 1970, Dr. Gunter Voss, former director of Assiniboine Park Zoo in Winnipeg, was appointed director, and the clearing and grading of the new site began. Dr. Voss was, as I recall, an eccentric individual—and nowhere was that eccentricity better displayed than how he went about hiring me.

Next week: Kicked, Bitten, and Head Butted

An Atlanta Zoo Goes to Court

[image error]After the arrival of its first elephant, the Gress Zoo continued to prosper. By July 1893, Captain Gress, as he was called, was planning to enlarge the zoo after returning from a trip to visit zoos in Cincinnati, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. “The zoo is a hobby with him,” according to reports. “His heart is set on making the Gress zoo one of the finest in the country.” According to his obituary, he did just that. When he died on August 28th, 1934. The Atlanta Constitution reported that:

Few men have contributed more to the happiness of Atlanta children than George V. Gress, whose death occurred Tuesday in Jacksonville where he had lived for the past 20 years. For nearly a half century, thousands of children annually have gained both pleasure and instruction in wildlife in visits to the zoo at Grant park.

 

I wonder if he knew, as he lay dying, that another zoo in Atlanta was in the news. On Friday, July 21st, 1934, just one month before Gress died, jurors from a City of Decatur courtroom visited the Briarcliff Zoological Garden. They were considering a lawsuit brought by a neighbor of the zoo. She was seeking $25,000 in damages because, according to news reports, “her property has decreased in value because of the nearness of the zoo”. This was not the first time the Briarcliff zoo and its wealthy owner had been in the news—nor would it be the last.

[image error]The Briarcliff zoo was part of the 42-acre estate of Asa Candler, Jr., the fabulously wealthy son of one of the founders of the Coca Cola company. Candler dabbled in real estate, but he was primarily known as an eccentric socialite with a big, boisterous personality. The zoo, located on his property at the intersection of Briarcliff Road and University Drive in the Druid Hills neighborhood, was no small affair. It was designed by the same architect who designed Candler’s mansion and gardens. By March 1932, his zoo was already an attraction in the neighborhood with its monkeys, bears, elk, and buffalo, and Candler was in the process of purchasing elephants, lions, chimpanzees, camels, baboons, leopards, and more.

But five months later, trouble was brewing. As Candler planned to host a charity circus on his property, neighbors were reportedly “preparing to seek relief from the presence of the zoo” claiming that the odors and the noises constituted a nuisance. They were hiring legal counsel and planned to ask Candler to “remove the zoo to some location where it will not annoy the neighbors”. If he refused, they would take him to court. It took them two years, but in July 1934 a City of Decatur jury was finally touring the property.

[image error]By early 1934, Candler was, in fact, facing multiple lawsuits for his various dealings and in February of that year, a court ruling allowed the DeKalb County tax collector to levy a $100 per day “amusement tax” on the Briarcliff Zoological Garden. Two days before Christmas 1934, an Associated Press article in the Atlanta Constitution foretold the troubles that lay ahead for Asa Candler, Jr. and his beloved zoo. The expense of keeping five elephants, thirty monkeys, eleven lions, and dozens of other animals was becoming a drain on Candler’s considerable resources. The news headline read: Front Yard Zoo of Asa Candler is Running a Husky Winter Deficit.

One month later, in January 1935, Candler said he would sell his zoo to anyone who would pay his $20,000 asking price. The New York city parks department offered half that for his collection of 160 animals, which were said to be valued at closer to $50,000.

Candler was soon prepared to donate his entire collection to the city of Atlanta under one condition—that “proper housing for the valuable animals and rare birds be provided”. The cost of that housing would be considerable—originally reported to be in the range of $15,000 but rising to $50,000—especially for the animals that were “somewhat delicate in Atlanta’s climate”. The city refused to bear the cost, insisting that the money be raised from voluntary contributions by the public. A fundraising campaign was launched and by March 1st, about $30,000 had been raised. By early April, though the fundraising was still far short of its goal at $41,876.50, all of Candler’s animals had already been moved to Grant park.

According to the Zoo’s website, the park swelled with the arrival of the entire Briarcliff Road collection, which included elephants, leopards, water buffalo, elk, zebra, birds, a hyena and a sea lion, not to mention Jimmie Walker, Grant Park’s first tiger.

By May 1935, just three years after it began, the Briarcliff Zoological Garden had disappeared. According to news reports, Candler announced that “the steel and concrete building which formerly housed the zoo” was going to be turned into an indoor swimming pool for public use during the winter months.

The two remarkable men who were responsible for the founding and early development of Zoo Atlanta could have not been more different. George V. Gress was a hard-working and industrious young man who managed to rise through the ranks to become independently wealthy. Asa Candler, Jr. inherited his wealth. Gress had a reputation for honesty and integrity while Candler was described as boisterous and eccentric. But both men had a respect for and fascination with animals, and an appreciation for how important those animals were for the enrichment of their community. Gress bought a circus and donated the animals to the city. Candler once hosted a charity circus at his zoo and donated the proceeds to the Scottish Rite hospital. Candler also ended up donating his entire collection of animals to the city.

Both the Gress zoo and Candler’s Briarcliff zoo have been consigned to the history books and are long forgotten, but the legacy of both men lives on in one of America’s great zoos—Zoo Atlanta.

 

Next week: Toronto’s Riverdale Zoo – a social infrastructure lost

Atlanta’s Elephant Parade

[image error]Zoo Atlanta’s first elephant walked into Grant park by way of Milledge Avenue on an August afternoon in 1890. She was at the head of a two-mile long parade the likes of which the city had never seen. “Queen Clio,” according to the Atlanta Constitution, “was very tired after the long weary march through the dust and dearth of the long six-mile route.” Her walk was the culmination of an epic journey that had begun a month earlier in Hamburg, Germany.

Soon after George V. Gress donated a zoo full of animals to the city in 1889, Atlanta began its search for an elephant to complement its new animal collection. By early 1890, the newspaper had established an Elephant Fund to encourage donations, a New York broker was hired, and several elephants were discussed. A twelve-year-old female Asian elephant was finally located in Germany and was purchased in July by the Atlanta Constitution newspaper.

According to reports, “her keeper, Otto, first made her acquaintance in 1880, when she was very small.” She had traveled extensively with various circuses but was enjoying a year of rest in the zoological garden at Hamburg.

After her purchase, she was loaded onto a ship that delivered her to the port of Philadelphia on July 31st, 1890. A lengthy article in the Atlanta Constitution announced her arrival. “Atlanta’s elephant is on Pennsylvania soil and tomorrow morning begins her journey Atlanta-ward.” The superintendent of New York’s Central Park Zoo supervised her unloading and the only glitch occurred when “the great lifting machinery of the steamer was taxed in getting the elephant out of the hold. Once there was an ominous slip in one of the pulley fastenings, but it meant nothing, and the animal was safely landed at last.”

She traveled from the docks of Philadelphia to the city of Atlanta by rail in a special car that had been built “for the purpose of transporting the precious animal, modeled after the elephant cars of Forepaugh’s circus train”.

Five days later, the train pulled into Atlanta’s Piedmont park and her car was switched to a siding. It was a short walk to her temporary enclosure, where “the great beast will enjoy a week’s rest after her long voyage”. According to reports, she was “a fine animal, well broke, standing on its head, hind feet, running races, and also carrying a howdah for riding children.”

On Sunday, August 10 the headline said, “The Elephant Gives a Show”.

Five days rest have made the elephant and her keeper themselves again. When they arrived last Tuesday morning, after a trip of nearly four weeks, both were fagged out and not in a humor to see company. But a good oiling of the elephant’s skin, with a hundred pounds or so of hay every day, an apple or bon bon now and then, and plenty of water, have put her in a comfortable condition of mind and body.

 

“Keeper Havens of the Gress Zoo,” the report continued, “has already prepared a place for her in the North end of the Grant park menagerie.” The newspaper had sponsored a naming contest and announced that “Nemo will be christened with her new name Clio, next Tuesday night”.

The elaborate transfer to her permanent home at Grant park was planned for Thursday, August 14th. The day would begin with an elephant show from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m. (what she did for five hours, I can’t imagine). A parade would commence at 2 p.m. and arrive at Grant park around 4 p.m. That evening, one-hundred invited guests would attend the Gress banquet hosted by Mr. G. V. Gress, president of the park commission “to celebrate the formal establishment of the zoological garden as one of the institutions of Atlanta”.

The parade began with the elephant walking from Piedmont park to Peachtree Street where the rest of the procession fell-in behind her. It was estimated that the military marching units and two miles of floats would take “two hours to move from Piedmont park to Grant park. This will make it nearly an hour passing any given point.” After walking through downtown Atlanta, the elephant turned left on Mitchell Street and marched past Georgia’s new State capitol building before turning down Hill Street and Milledge Avenue into Grant park.

At the zoo, “a space in the big [zoo] building has been allotted [for the elephant], near the main entrance. It has been neatly floored, and windows on either side admit light and air. The floor is made of stout planks, and a huge post has been driven into the ground, to which she will be fastened.”

[image error]Though it is sad to think about the conditions in which zoo animals were kept, this is just a look back. It is not a remembrance of “the good old days”. It is meant to help us realize how far we have come in the last 129 years and how much thought and effort we will expend to ensure that our zoo animals have a humane and “happy” place to live. According to the zoo’s website,

[image error]The new elephant environment more than triples the size of the elephants’ former habitat and is a dynamic living space featuring elements specifically designed for elephant well-being and enrichment. Elements include Abana Pond, the largest of the complex’s three water features, a pond with 360-degree access and a gentle slope for ease of use by multiple elephants. Other elements include Chishimba Falls and Kalambo Falls, waterfalls named for falls in Africa, and a feeder enrichment activity wall. The state-of-the-art indoor Zambezi Elephant Center also features elements incorporated with elephant well-being in mind, including sand under their feet. The guest experience at the Zambezi Elephant Center offers visitors an opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at the elephants’ care.

 

[image error]But there is one small nod to the zoo’s past in the new African Savanna. When Clio entered the zoo in 1890, she would have passed Lake Abana, a six-acre, linear lake that occupied the southwest corner of the park—roughly where the zoo parking lot is today. It was a popular feature with a large boat house for the rental of boats and canoes. Lake Abana was drained in the 1960s for zoo expansion. The new elephant environment features a pond with 360-degree access for ease of use by the elephants. It is the largest of the complex’s three water features. It is called Abana Pond.

An Orderly and Quiet Crowd

“Wasn’t there a crowd at Grants’ Park yesterday?”, began the article in the Monday morning Atlanta newspaper.

[image error]It should come as no surprise that the first Sunday in April would attract a nice crowd to Grant Park, but no one alive has seen a crowd quite like this one. This was the zoo’s first special event—a grand opening that occurred 130 years ago, on April 7th, 1889. There was no circling the lot looking for a parking space because there were no cars. The visitors were “all dressed in their best”, [image error]not in today’s uniform of shorts, flip-flops, and baseball caps. And the zoo they had come to see—well, it wasn’t much of a zoo, at least not yet.

“The menagerie,” according to the article, “was arranged in a row around the sides of a large shelter, built as a temporary habitat for the animals of the zoo, and was visited and revisited by thousands of people”.

A great deal of amusement was to be gotten out of the cage of monkeys who were fed with apples, candy, and peanuts until they couldn’t hold another bit. These comical little fellows seemed to know that a great deal was expected from them on this, their first day at Grants’ park, and jumped and frisked round as they had never done since their captivity. A good many people also gathered around the cages of the lion and lioness, and some were venturesome and poked sticks at them when the keeper’s head was turned, while some were afraid and would not go nearer than ten feet. Altogether the zoo feature of the park was a huge success and attracted thousands of people who would not otherwise have gone out to the park at all.

Most people arrived on something called “the dummy line”. This was a single-track streetcar route with a couple of open passenger cars and a tiny steam engine called a “dummy”—so named because it had the appearance of one of the coaches and was thought to be less frightening to horses.

The crowd was noted as being, “white and black, rich and poor, young and old, men, women and children, all bent on having a good time”. People began arriving shortly after 10:00 o’clock

It was estimated that fully 12,000 people visited the park yesterday, and there is good reason to believe that the estimate is about correct. The crowd which had been constantly touring all day long commenced to leave about 5 O’clock, and from that time on until late at night the rush to get seats was something tremendous. Fully 300 people stood waiting for each train to arrive, and when it did come, they rammed and jammed and crashed, all trying to get on two cars that were not built to hold more than 50 passengers each, but somehow the majority managed to get on and the rest had to satisfy themselves as best they could until the next train, when some of them were more fortunate. And it is to the credit of the citizens of Atlanta and the park authorities that it can be said of the crowd that is was the most orderly and quiet crowd that was ever congregated in one place before. Not a drunk, not a disorderly character, nothing to mar the thorough enjoyment of the beautiful spring day that heralded the first appearance of the Gress Zoo at Grant Park.

[image error]And with the recent opening of Zoo Atlanta’s African Savanna on August 8th, 2019 I hope  those opening day crowds were a credit to the citizens of Atlanta. I hope we had an orderly and quiet crowd with no drunk or disorderly characters. It would have been nice to see the headline in the next morning’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution read, “Wasn’t there a crowd at Grants’ Park yesterday?”.

A Circus at Auction

[image error]If you want to understand the impact of financial difficulties on the early circus, I highly recommend Sara Gruen’s best-selling, 2006 novel Water for Elephants. Though a work of fiction, the book helped me imagine the personal cost to the employees for a circus on hard times. What recourse did performers and workers have against cash-strapped owners? Since the circus was constantly on the road and it provided them with food and housing, workers were at the mercy of their employers. They might pay valuable performers while expendable workers were not—until, eventually, everybody left the paymasters wagon empty handed.

That, it appears, is what happened to The Hall and Bingley Circus in March 1889 when it passed through Atlanta. The owners were bankrupt and could not pay their employees. According to newspaper reports, the circus was stopped by an attachment—this followed by many others of a like manner [primarily for wages that were past-due to employees] leads to the appointment of a Receiver. A few days later, on Saturday, March 23rd, the stranded Hall & Bingley Circus is quartered at Jones & Rosser’s stables on hunter Street. Mr. J. L. Lester has been appointed as Receiver.

[image error]The Receivers placed multiple prominent notices in the Atlanta Constitution announcing that the circus was to be sold at auction and, by all accounts, the auction was a success. Businessmen Thomas James and George Gress purchased the circus, with Gress taking the animals and James everything else. Gress was hailed for his generosity when he presented the menagerie animals to the City of Atlanta as the nucleus of a zoological garden.

The Gress collection was modest—no elephants, giraffes, or zebras—but it was enough to start a zoo. The menagerie consisted of a hyena, a jaguar, a black bear, several lions, and two cages of monkeys. Assorted other animals included two wild cats, a gazelle, and a trained Mexican hog. After Gress reportedly sold all the horses he had purchased to local interests and two camels to the agent of a show in Tennessee, he was out-of-pocket $1,350 (a value of over $37,000 in 2019) for cages and zoo animals.

Grant Park seemed a logical choice for the new zoo since it had been home to a small animal collection for several years. In addition to purchasing the animals, Gress donated lumber for buildings, pledged funding for the upkeep of the collection, and opposed an admission fee to “his” zoo.

Starting a zoo must have seemed pretty simple to Gress when he declared that the circus animals are already in cages and all the authorities will have to do will be to build a light structure into which the cages may be rolled to protect them from the weather and from interference. Unlike today, when we would spend months preparing for a grand opening, the Gress Zoo would open to the public in less than two weeks. And what an opening it would be!

The Zoo–A Curious History

From circus menagerie to modern-day ark
My recent articles in the Albany Herald about the history of the Tift Park Zoo and my current blogs about Zoo Atlanta’s origins have whetted my appetite. So I have decided to launch a new series of blogs called The Zoo–A Curious History . Each month I will highlight a different zoo in a series of Thursday episodes.

[image error]

To understand the history of zoos in North America, we really need to begin with a look back at the traveling, tented circus, which began in America in the early years of the nineteenth century. When we think about the circus today, we imagine the big top with its 3-rings of performers. But in the early days of the circus, there was another part of the operation that was nearly as important as the performers. That was the menagerie. Early circuses included collections of animals that featured an astonishing variety of exotic beasts—animals like giraffes, hippos, and even polar bears.

By the turn of the 20th century, the economics of a traveling menagerie began to shift as zoos sprang up all over North America. The earliest ones appeared in the 1870s in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Chicago and by 1900 dozens of cities had their own zoos—cities like New York, Baltimore, Cleveland, Dallas, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Denver, and Toledo.

As zoos became more popular in the 1920s and 30s, monumental buildings were built to house their burgeoning animal collections. Many of the conditions for the animals in those early years were appalling. Cages were small, and animals were treated as objects of amusement. Some zoos even sold sticks so people could prod the animals into action.

After World War Two, a new emphasis was placed on sanitation and cages were lined with easy to clean ceramic tile and stainless-steel bars. But the animal collections were the same, so animals were remained in small cages. Finally, in the 1970s, all of that began to change and, as my luck would have it, that is I arrived on the scene. As I was beginning my zoo career; cities all over North America were transforming their zoos.

[image error]Author with pronghorn ca. 1975

The San Diego zoo opened its Wild Animal Park on nearly two thousand acres of property in May 1972. Minneapolis, Minnesota completed a new 500-acre zoo in the suburb of Apple Valley May 1978. The Zoological Society of Miami Florida began construction on a 600-acre zoo in 1975. And in August 1974, I was working for the Toronto zoo as it developed its new 700-acre, $28 million zoo. And zoos that weren’t relocating were rebuilding, in cities like Tampa, Toledo, and Atlanta.

Zoos have continued to make remarkable progress since then. Michael Robinson, director of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in the 1980s and 1990s, was an advocate for something he called the BioPark, a place that would combine elements of existing zoos, aquariums, natural history museums, and botanical gardens under one comprehensive umbrella—a concept that would be recognizable in many modern zoos.

But I am fascinated with the older stories—the unknown & untold tales of our past. So, for the next few months I plan to explore the animals, people, and communities that make up our American Zoo Story. We will travel from San Francisco to Washington, DC. We’ll look at the old zoos like Philadelphia and Lincoln Park and the not-so-old, like Tampa’s Lowry Park. The Zoo–A Curious History might even make a good podcast, depending on how many likes and followers we can generate.

Next Thursday, we will continue our look back at the curious history of an American zoo in a city where a circus came to town—and never left.