The zoo has become one of the borough’s top tourist attractions and a beacon of animal conservation.
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- The Roosevelt Island Daily News
One hundred and twenty-five years after it first opened its doors in 1899 (and more than 250 million visitors later), the Bronx Zoo is kicking off a season of anniversary events.
“We have been a leader in animal care, exhibit design, education and conservation ever since,” Zoo Director Jim Breheny said at a celebration earlier this month attended by Bronx politicians including Borough President Vanessa Gibson, her predecessor Ruben Diaz Jr., Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado and Councilmember Rafael Salamanca Jr., along with student council representatives from nearby P.S. 205 and dozens of others gathered at the Schiff Family Great Hall.
The zoo’s founding and earlier years were stained by the racism and white supremacy that were part and parcel of many of New York City’s historic institutions. In one notorious early 20th century incident, an African man was made an exhibit in the zoo’s Monkey House.
But the zoo has grown into one of the city’s premier tourism spots over the decades, while also struggling to modernize its ethics and practices, including most recently over the zoo’s two remaining captive elephants, Happy and Patty.
“The Bronx Zoo played a major role in preserving the American Bison,” Bronx Borough Historian Angel Hernandez told THE CITY in an interview earlier this month. The species had nearly gone extinct as Europeans systematically killed and depleted a vital nutritional and economic resource for Indigenous peoples during the 1870s. As part of that effort, he continued, “there were strips of Pelham Parkway where the bison were grazing” in the early 1900s before they were “re-released back into the American West.”
The 125th anniversary celebration featured dance performances from the Thunderbird American Indian dancers and the Harambee drummers and dancers, who welcomed Gibson to join the party and break out her one-two step.
“If we are talking about pathways to college and careers, it starts at the Bronx Zoo,” Gibson said at the event. “If we are talking about keeping our young people safe from a plague of gun violence, it starts at the Bronx Zoo. If we are talking about believing in the possibilities of our young people, it starts at the Bronx Zoo.”
Atziri Amaro, a 10-year-old student at P.S. 205, told THE CITY she enjoyed hearing elected officials and zoo administrators discuss opportunities to expose young people to wildlife.
“I like how they’re planning for the youth,” said Amaro, who counts the lion as her favorite animal at the zoo. “It never gives up.”
More than half a million children visit the zoo each year, according to Breheny, who said his favorite animal is the dog because “we’ve evolved with them for thousands of years.”
‘Not the Proudest Moment’
While New Yorkers today have all kinds of indoor entertainment options, when the zoo opened they relied on outdoor attractions when they needed to keep cool in hot summers.
“Clason Point Amusement Park had a huge pool that fit close to 2,000 people and they called it the inkwell because it was unfiltered water. That’s how dirty it was,” said Hernandez, who’s also director of government operations for the New York Botanical Garden. “But people will still jump in there on hot summer days. It was outdoor fun. And then that’s why the Bronx Zoo and Botanical Gardens – they were such a hot thing.”
In 1853, while seeking to slow down the loss of wildlife and green space amid urbanization in what is now Manhattan, the New York State Legislature enacted a law that carved out 775 acres of land to create Central Park, marking the first time the city used eminent domain to create a major landscaped park while displacing an estimated 1,600 residents in the process.
The move provided a blueprint to do the same a few miles north in 1889, leading to the creation of Bronx Park at a time when the neighborhoods near the Bronx Zoo, now called West Farms and Crotona, were mostly farmland.
The city acquired 640 acres to create Bronx Park at the same time it seized land for Van Cortlandt Park, Pelham Bay Park, Crotona Park, Claremont Park and St. Mary’s Park. The city then allotted 250 acres to the New York Zoological Society, now the Wildlife Conservation Society, to create the Bronx Zoo.
The zoo’s founders were avowed white supremacists Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn, two of the founders of the American Eugenicists Society. In 1916, when he was still serving as chair of the New York Zoological Society, Grant published a book, The Passing of the Great Race, arguing that white people from Northern and Western Europe were superior to all other races.
In the book’s preface, Osborn wrote that ‘the greatest danger which threatens the American republic to-day [is] the gradual dying out among our people of those hereditary traits through which the principles of our religious, political and social foundations were laid down and their insidious replacement by traits of less noble character.”
For one week in 1906, the zoo forced Ota Benga, an African man from the Democratic Republic of Congo to be an attraction in the Monkey House exhibit. He was given a bow and arrow to defend himself from the orangutans with whom he now lived, noted Hernandez. Black ministers and lawyers, led by Rev. James H. Gordon, successfully advocated for Benga’s release.
Benga, who had already been exhibited at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri and at the American Museum of Natural History prior to his enslavement at the Bronx Zoo, shot and killed himself in 1916 while living in Virginia.
“It was something that we have acknowledged is not the proudest moment in our history,” Breheny told THE CITY after the April 18 celebration. “But you have to remember in the time that occurred, there was the World’s Fair in St. Louis, which is why all those types of exhibits occurred. And it’s just something that happened in the context of the time, and we walked away from it as soon as we could, even then.”
Following protests over Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd in June of 2020, the zoo put out a statement apologizing for displaying Benga, writing that “We deeply regret that many people and generations have been hurt by these actions or by our failure previously to publicly condemn and denounce them.”
Elephants in the Room
Just before The Bronx Zoological Park, as it was initially named, officially opened in 1899, the New York Sun newspaper noted it would be a place where New Yorkers could see deer and elk along with “many foxes, bears, some zoo rabbits, reindeer, wolves, snakes, guinea pigs, prairie dogs, eagles, owls, ducks and geese.”
Elephants first arrived in 1904, and the zoo stopped accepting new ones in 2006, in response to public pressure about criticizing elephant captivity though the institution has resisted calls for the elephants to be transferred to a more spacious environment, with the state’s high court rejecting a 2018 suit by the Nonhuman Rights Project.
Happy, 54, and Patty, 53, are the zoo’s two remaining elephants. Happy has been there since 1977. A spokesperson for the Bronx Zoo did not answer a question asking when Patty arrived.
Last year, Brooklyn Councilmember Shahana Hanif introduced a bill that would have effectively forced the zoo to release custody of the two elephants, but it lacked support from her Bronx colleagues.
Councilmember Rafael Salamanca Jr., whose district includes a portion of the zoo, took aim at those efforts on Thursday.
“We do have some elected officials that are trying to get rid of the elephants in the zoo,” said Salamanca Jr., who declined to join the Harambee dancers. “And so I can tell you that one of my legislative priorities is to ensure that Happy and Patty stay right here at the Bronx Zoo.”
‘Our Free Day’
John Calvelli, executive vice president of public affairs at the Bronx Zoo, highlighted how the institution now positions itself as an easily accessible public resource.
“Every year at the Bronx Zoo, we have 370,000 people that come to the Bronx Zoo, free or reduced,” Calvelli said. “We work with shelters, where we work with community organizations, organizations that couldn’t come on our free day,” which is Wednesday. “We want to try to make sure that people that can’t come on Wednesday can come to the Bronx Zoo.”
On other days, it charges a general admission fee of $37.75 for adults, $33.25 for seniors and $28.75 for children between 3 and 12 years old.
The New York Botanical Garden has provided free access to its grounds to Bronx residents from Tuesday through Sunday and on holiday Mondays since the summer of 2020, as the pandemic pushed people outdoors.
But while the zoo is only yards away, some locals have never made it in.
“I’ve been living here since August 2021 and still haven’t went in there,” Anthony Fennell, 37, told THE CITY on Tuesday, who lives across the street from the zoo near its Asia Gate entrance on Bronx Park South.
Fennell, who can’t visit the zoo on Wednesdays because he has health-related obligations then, said the cost is prohibitive.
“The money that they’re asking for, I’m not doing it,” he said.
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