★★★★★ 5.0
Discover
Central Park Zoo
This zoo was never supposed to exist. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed Central Park without any plans for animals, yet here you stand at America's second oldest public zoo, born from pure chaos and accident. Picture this... 1859, a park messenger boy named Philip Holmes discovers a bear cub tied to a tree, abandoned by some unknown soul. Instead of shooing it away, he takes it in. Soon donations pour in from across the city... monkeys, cranes, peacocks, even dead specimens. By 1864, over four hundred animals crowded behind that Arsenal building you see there, turning Central Park into an unplanned menagerie that drew two and a half million visitors annually. The most beloved resident was Mike Crowley, a chimpanzee so famous that former President Ulysses S. Grant himself came calling in the 1880s just to meet him. Then came 1874's greatest zoo panic... the New York Herald published a front-page story claiming a rhinoceros had escaped, followed by polar bears and Bengal tigers rampaging through Manhattan. Pure fiction, but half the city fled in terror before reading the tiny retraction buried at the article's end. Today, within these mere seven acres, lives Manhattan's only cow and seventy-four penguins who've never seen Antarctica.
Did You Know?
- The Central Park Zoo traces its origins to the 1860s, making it one of the oldest zoos in the United States—it began as the Central Park Menagerie, a free public animal collection that attracted millions of working-class New Yorkers and was the nation’s first public zoo, reflecting a democratic vision for city parks that clashed with elite preferences for exclusive spaces.
- The zoo is home to the whimsical Dancing Goat and Dancing Bear statues by Frederick Roth, which date back to the 1934 renovation and are still visible today—these playful sculptures are a reminder of the zoo’s historic charm and the era when public art became a key part of New York’s urban landscape.
- Central Park Zoo is surprisingly compact—just 7 acres—but packs in three major biomes (Tropic Zone, Temperate Territory, and Polar Circle), 23 species of waterfowl, and a lively colony of 74 penguins, offering families a diverse, hands-on wildlife experience in the heart of Manhattan.