THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, October 24, 1994 TAG: 9410240035
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NEW ORLEANS LENGTH: Long : 216 lines
It's a sunny Saturday morning and everyone is coming to the zoo.
There are suburban housewives pushing strollers the color of beach balls. Teenage girls with frizzy long hair and tight shorts. Teenage boys in urban fashions - high-top sneakers and baggy pants.
Most of all, there are kids. Everywhere. Every other big-sized person coming through one of the six turnstiles has a little-sized person on one or both arms. There are wobbly toddlers, irritating adolescents, excited 5-year-olds and hordes of bantam-weight little boys who seem to exist to run around in circles and scream.
This horde is coming to the Audubon zoo in uptown New Orleans. It is an example of one of the new zoos that cities all over the country are building. They are showcases, family attractions, points of pride. They revolve around chucking the classic iron-barred cage and putting animals in settings that resemble their natural habitats. Last year, just under a million people walked through Audubon's gates.
Norfolk wants to build one of its own.
The Virginia Zoological Park, a municipal zoo in Lafayette Park off Granby Street, is about the same size as the Audubon zoo, with a similar urban setting. The Virginia Zoological Society, a private fund-raising group, and the city recently split the cost for a new master plan to expand the zoo. The same architect from the firm that designed the New Orleans zoo created the plan. The society is about to ask contractors to bid on the design for the first phase of the project. Several Norfolk City Council members have already visited the New Orleans zoo and returned excited about expanding their own.
The projected cost for the first phase is $15 million.
The city of Norfolk owns the zoo and has pledged to match whatever the society raises. The society hopes to raise $5 million from private donations, $5 million from the state and $5 million in matching city funds.
The city and private backers believe an improved zoo could be Norfolk's next ``big project.'' The city has an opera house, Nauticus, a convention center and a ballpark. More than an opera house or even a ballpark, a good zoo appeals to all ages and incomes.
Right now, 300,000 people visit the Virginia zoo annually. The zoo society hopes to complete the first phase of the renovation in three years and push yearly attendance to 800,000.
The zoo houses elephants, bison and monkeys and a hundred other species in humane but spartan conditions. Having Siberian tigers in a bare-boned cage doesn't show how the animals live in the wilds of northern Russia. The expansion will increase the number of animals but, more importantly, will change the way they are shown.
The New Orleans zoo doesn't put animals in square concrete cages with iron bars and a bucket of water. The animals are still confined, but in well-appointed spaces. Some have several acres of grass. Smaller spaces the size of a living room might have rocky, natural-looking cliffs, boulders and flowing electronically-pumped streams.
The ``bars'' in some cages are moats of water, or concrete cliffs, or thin, barely visible strands of steel. The idea is to re-create a small version of the animal's natural habitat. It's for the viewer's benefit more than the animals', say zoo supervisors. It shows people a snapshot of how animals live in the wild.
One of the most popular exhibits in New Orleans is the bayou swamp carved out of one corner of the park. Tall trees and a grove of bamboo hide the railroad tracks, houses and the Mississippi River beyond. You see bears, cougar and otters. It includes a nature trail, where you walk around a lush-looking pond and watch egrets swat their wings and snapping turtles contemplate life on logs.
The exhibit also shows how man interacts with the swamp. So it includes crab pots, traditional flat-bottom boats used for fishing in the 1930s andO even an old oil rig.
The zoo has become immensely popular. And not just with children. Cab drivers, desk clerks, businessmen and restaurant managers questioned at random all said they visit.
``Yes, I go there three or four times a year,'' said a waitress in a white apron in a run-down sandwich shop in the city's garden district. ``My daughter just loves it.'' The Audobon's salvation
The Audubon zoo wasn't always so special.
``You could smell it from a quarter mile away,'' remembered one native New Orleaner. ``The animals were in these small little cages. And of course nobody went there.''
Its revitalization plays like some story of a sinner who's been saved.
Ronald Forman, the Audubon Institute's executive director, was the savior. He took over the zoo in the late 1970s and started pushing. He persuaded residents, the government and corporations to donate money.
Forman is now a political and community power in New Orleans. He leads the Audubon Institute, which supervises the zoo and several other wildlife projects. It recently opened an aquarium on the edge of the French Quarter, despite shippers objecting that the building jutting out into the Mississippi River might interfere with maritime traffic.
The Audubon Institute has an annual budget now of $17 million, of which the zoo's portion is $8 million. Between the zoo and the aquarium, the institute has 80,000 households signed up as members. It employees 625 people full time. The zoo employs almost 200 people, with another 100 or so part-time workers.
By comparison, the Norfolk zoo, the only major zoo between Ashboro, N.C., and Washington has a $1.6 million budget and employs 27 people full time, and a dozen or so part-timers.
Including every snake, turtle and lion, the Audubon zoo has more than 1,600 animals of almost 400 different species. The Norfolk zoo has a little more than 300 animals from about 100 different species.
The number of visitors to the Audubon zoo has gone from 60,000 in the 1970s to 975,000 in 1993. Its annual ``Zoo-to-do'' fund-raiser has turned into the social event of the season. Last year's event raised about $400,000.
Going to the Audubon zoo costs $7.75 for adults, $3.75 for children and senior citizens, and is free for infants. For $49, you can buy a family membership that entitles everyone in a household to admission for a year. An individual membership costs $30, $20 for students, $15 for senior citizens. The zoo has 35,000 members, both individual and families - compared with 600 members in the late 1970s.
Norfolk's zoo costs $2 for adults, $1 for children and senior citizens. The fee is likely to rise after expansion, but zoo officials said they do not know by how much. The Virginia Zoological Society has 15,000 members and hopes to double or triple that with the renovation.
While the animal exhibits are the park's focus, the Audubon zoo puts them in a setting that has the tranquillity, even quaintness, of an old-fashioned zoo. There are plazas, pathways and fountains, and iron benches where you can catch the air and sun. The zoo even holds pop music concerts a few times a year on a stage under huge spreading oaks.
``It's no different than any other theme park or exhibit,'' said the zoo's director, Bob Becker. ``You have to have new exhibits and events to keep people coming back.''
The latest was called ``Earth Stalkers.'' For two extra bucks, visitors could walk along a small trail where mechanized plastic dinosaurs, each about 6 feet tall or so, growled and moved stiffly. On one Sunday afternoon, not too many people had chosen to see fake, extinct animals twitch their limbs while not far away live ones did the same. Five continents
The plan that architect Azeo Torre has drawn for Norfolk's zoo shows it divvied up into five continents - Africa, Asia, Australia, South America and North America. Each would feature the wildlife and settings of that continent. The North American section would be centered around the zoo's signature exhibit on the Dismal Swamp. It would be very similar to the bayou swamp exhibit that has proved to be so popular in New Orleans.
The master plan for the zoo off Granby Street would take up 55 acres, most of which the zoo already occupies. The first phase of the expansion would require a few more acres for the African exhibit where an unused amphitheater now sits on the northern side of Lafayette Park. The Audubon zoo takes up 58 acres.
The first phase of the Virginia zoo, which the $15 million would pay for, would cover the African Savannah exhibit, a butterfly house, the Dismal Swamp section and a home for the Siberian tigers already under construction. The African exhibit would have a stream to separate people from giraffes, rhinos, zebras and other animals. The butterfly house would be a large, glass-ceilinged building wherebutterflies could alight on visitors as they enter. The Dismal Swamp would have deer, bear and such unique creatures as the Dismal Swamp shrew. Theater of the wild
Such theatrical presentations are really more akin to carefully crafted stage sets than wild animals' native homes.
During the day, the black bear at the New Orleans zoo scuffles around a half-acre or so of green grass studded with trees and big, broken logs. At night, he goes into a 10-foot by 10-foot cage that looks basically like a jail cell. It has a wooden bunk bed and thick iron bars.
While the bear is caged, the keeper feeds it and tidies up the exhibit out front. He might replace plant life, vary the position of a log, or hide bits of food so the bear will roam to amuse of visitors.
In the Asian Domain of the Audubon, the stage areas for the elephants, tigers and other animals project from a nearly invisible central hub that holds the night houses. The hub is concealed by man-made cliffs and other natural-looking scenery. In the swamp area, the night houses for the the bear and cougar back up to an access road that is hidden by a high grove of bamboo.
``The public is unaware of probably 95 percent of what we do,'' said Jack Cochran, a partner in Design Consortium, which created the Audubon Zoo. ``They just see the exhibit and say, `Isn't that great.' ''
Not everyone remembers, or ever knew, that zoos used to be less concerned with ethics. Instead of protecting animals, they often snatched them from far-away jungles, helping to deplete the world supply.
In the 1970s, spurred by new federal oversight, the American Zoo and Aquarium Association began accrediting zoos and making them live up to a tough set of standards. Norfolk's was accredited in 1987.
``About 20 or 25 years ago, the profession finally got a conscience,'' said Gary Oshsenbein, director of the Virginia zoo. ``It has since attracted a totally different genre of workers.''
Accredited zoos get few animals, if any, from the wild. When a zoo obtains a gazelle or a zebra, it comes usually because one in another zoo gave birth.
``It's a nearly closed system,'' said Oshsenbein.
As the appearance of zoos changed, so has their fundamental purpose. Zoos don't want you to just look at a bear or a tiger. They want you to look at a bear in forest, or a tiger in a jungle. The idea is that you will then go home and send a check to the Nature Conservancy or lobby a city council to save Back Bay.
``The prime justification for zoos now is a message of wildlife conservation,'' said Becker, Audubon's director. ``Now you want them to leave the zoo with something, to become, in a sense, environment activists.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo by] ALEX MARSHALL/Staff
New Orleans
Natural Habitat: Tigers, and most other animals, at the New Orleans
zoo are kept in enclosures that resemble their natural surroundings
instead of cages.
[Color Photo by] PAUL AIKEN/Staff
Norfolk
Fenced-in felines: Many of the animals at the Virginia Zoological
Park, such as this tiger, now spend their days behind bars and
fences. The first phase of zoo expansion would put animals in more
natural pens and organize them around the continents.
On the back page: A detailed look at the Virginia zoo's plans.
VIRGINIA ZOOLOGICAL PARK MASTER PLAN
KEN WRIGHT/Staff
Staff map
EXPANSION SCHEDULE
KEYWORDS: ZOO EXPANSION VIRGINIA ZOOLOGICAL PARK by CNB