Central Park Zoo Totally Explained

Everything about The Central Park Zoo totally explained

The Central Park Zoo is located in Central Park in New York City and run by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Areas

Trellised, vine-clad, glass-roofed pergolas link the three major exhibit areas—tropic, temperate and arctic— housed in discreet new buildings, of brick trimmed with granite, masked by vines. Now the Central Park Zoo is home to an indoor rainforest, a leafcutter ant colony, a chilled penguin house and Polar Bear pool. The Central Park Zoo houses breeding programs for some endangered species: tamarin monkeys, Wyoming Toads, Thick-billed Parrots and Red Pandas. There are also Fruit bats in the rainforest.

History

No zoo was envisaged in Olmsted and Vaux's original "Greensward" design for Central Park, but the Central Park menagerie evolved from gifts of exotic pets and other animals informally given to the Park, beginning, apparently, with a bear and some swans deposited near New York's arsenal on the edge of Central Park in 1859. It wasn't until 1864 that it received charter confirmation from New York's assembly. The informally developed menagerie was at first housed in the Arsenal building that predated the Park, located at Fifth Avenue facing East 64th Street. It was given more permanent quarters behind the Arsenal building in 1870. When the Central Park Menagerie was officially founded in 1864, it was the United States's second publicly owned zoo, after the Philadelphia Zoo, founded in 1859.
In 1934, to properly house the zoo, neo-Georgian brick and limestone zoo buildings ranged in a quadrangle round the sealion pool were designed by Aymar Embury II, architect for the Triborough Bridge and the Henry Hudson Bridge (WPA Guide). The famous sealion pool itself was originally designed by Charles Schmieder. For its day the sealion pool was considered advanced because the architect actually studied the habits of sealions and incorporated this knowledge into the design.

Redesign

By 1980, the zoo, like Central Park itself, was sadly dilapidated; in that year, responsibility for its management was assumed by the New York Zoological Society which is now the Wildlife Conservation Society. The zoo was closed in the winter of 1983, and demolition began. The redesign of 1983–88 was executed by the architectural firm of Kevin Roche, Dinkeloo. The old-fashioned menagerie cages were abandoned for more natural exhibits. The costs of the renovations, which had been originally budgeted at $22 million, reached a total of $35 million. The zoo reopened to the public on August 8, 1988.
   Some of the original buildings, with their low-relief limestone panels of animals, were reused in the redesigning, though the cramped outdoor cages were swept away. The central feature of the original zoo, ranged round the sea lion pool, was retained and the pool redesigned. Since its modernization the Central Park Zoo, traditionally available to parkgoers free of charge, charges admission to its enclosed precincts.
   In recent decades, most of the large animals were rehoused in larger, more natural spaces at the Bronx Zoo.
   The Central Park Zoo was featured in Robert Lawson's Mr. Popper's Penguins (1938) and in the animated films Madagascar (2005) and The Wild (2006).
   It was also featured in J.D. Salinger's classic novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

References

Further Information

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