The Tift Park Zoo, Albany Georgia’s extinct zoo
[image error]Most long-time residents of Albany, Georgia remember the day that Lasca the elephant walked from the Tift Park Zoo to her new home at Chehaw Park. The elephant was led on her three mile march by a city dump truck, followed by a zoo vehicle, and had traffic stopped to let her pass by the Albany Police Department.
According to Albany Herald staff writer Gary McElroy, who covered the October 26th, 1977 event in considerable detail, “People gathered in their yards and places of business along the route to watch a sight never before seen in Albany.”
But a recent thread of conversation on social media about Lasca’s walk to Chehaw Park illustrates how unreliable peoples’ memories can be. Two people remembered that the elephant died during the move—a detail that apparently escaped McElroy’s attention. Someone suggested that she balked “at the bridge and swam across the Kinchafoonee creek”. A number of people thought the walk was a bad idea and proved to be so stressful that Lasca died shortly after the move while others were glad she lived out her last few years in a more humane environment.
On the other hand, some plausible information emerged. One person, for example, recalled that zoo officials built a trailer to transport her, but the trailer would not support her weight. Perhaps that is what necessitated the weeks of short walks that someone else remembers—walks that were intended to get her prepared for the journey.
I was particularly interested in the details of the walk—how her handler, zoo director W. T. Hill, let her stop and rest, how he fed her treats from time to time and, most particularly, how she was spooked briefly by banging railroad cars nearby.
As a zookeeper at Busch Gardens in the early 1970s, the first task on my evening shift was to help walk five African elephants from their exhibit yard to their night-barn at the end of the day. They walked trunk-to-tail through a pasture occupied by zebra, giraffe, and other hoofed stock without incident—except on those occasions when the nine-year-old bull, Bwana, was spooked by something and broke out of line. His usual tactic was to run a few yards away, turn toward his handlers with his ears fanned out in a threat display, and dare us to approach him. On those evenings when I was the lead handler, it was my job to walk slowly toward him, calming him with the command “Bwana steady”, grab the six thousand pound animal by the tusk, and tell him to “move up” and “come in line”. I was taught to show no fear and be firm and commanding, but my hands trembled and my heart thumped as I considered what I would do if he refused my orders. He never did. It was only later in my career, after numerous reports of elephants killing their handlers, that I came to appreciate just how dangerous that situation was.
Even though W. T. Hill had Lasca secured by chains on her left front and left rear feet, her stroll down Jefferson Street and the Old Leesburg Road provided some tense moments. So why, I can’t help but wonder, was Lasca’s walk not front page news? Why was it buried on page eight, giving up the front page to a warning about the hazards of skateboards and an oil well explosion in California? What could be more symbolic of the end of an era than the last animal literally walking away from the Tift Park Zoo before it closed forever?
But for me, this begs a larger question. Why is so little documented about the history of the Tift Park Zoo? Everybody seems to remember Lasca the elephant; Joe the cigar smoking, poop-slinging chimpanzee; and the lion whose roars washed over Albany from the Flint River to the other side of Slappey Drive. But where did these animals come from and what happened to them? Most zoos have an origin story—that legendary first animal or the larger-than-life zoo director who defined the early zoo—but not, as far as I can tell, the Tift Park Zoo.
According to the National Register of Historic Places, Tift Park was founded in 1909, land was purchased in 1910 and 1911, and the layout was designed in 1912 by Atlanta-based architect Otto Kratzenstein. That is pretty specific. But when it comes to the zoo, the narrative becomes vague.
During the 1930s, according to the Registry, a small zoo was established, destroying one of the original carriage trails in the northeast section of the park. The next mention of the zoo in the Registry is the zoo’s move to Chehaw Park in 1977. What happened during the forty years in between? Were people so ashamed of the old zoo they just wanted to see it bulldozed into oblivion?
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 Tift Park Zoo was an element of Albany’s social infrastructure for more than forty years. It was a place that allowed Albanians to interact with one another while building relationships and memories.
In the coming weeks, I will explore the obscure history of Albany’s Tift Park Zoo. When was the zoo founded? Who were some of the people that oversaw its development? And how did a sea cow come to inhabit a small concrete pool in Albany, Georgia?