The Central Park Zoo Comes Back to Life

The Central Park Zoo closed in 1983, a menagerie of cramped cages that the city could no longer defend, let alone fund. The Wildlife Conservation Society, then still called the New York Zoological Society, had taken over management of the city's zoos in 1980 and used the shutdown to rebuild the Central Park site from the ground up. Architect Kevin Roche of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates replaced the old cages with three naturalistic zones, tropic, temperate, and polar, wrapped around the zoo's original sea lion pool. It reopened on August 8, 1988, with Mayor Ed Koch presiding over the ceremony, and for the first time in its history the zoo charged admission to help cover the bill.