Walking Down Memory Lane

"The past is a foreign country - they do things differently there."

- L.P. Hartley

With the exception of a few relatively young institutions, such as the Nashville Zoo, most major American zoos date back a century or more.   Philadelphia Zoo is generally (but not uncontestably) recognized as the first, opening in 1874.  Standards of animal care have evolved tremendously in the intervening century-and-a-half, which has left many zoos unrecognizable from their original forms.  Some zoos, such as the Bronx Zoo, have worked meticulously to incorporate their historical structures into a new, modern facility.  Others have bulldozed the old and rebuilt from scratch.

Then, there's the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore.

When The Baltimore Zoo, as it was then known, began its period of rapid growth in the 1980s and 1990s, adding the Children Zoo, Maryland Wilderness, and African Journey, it took advantage of its plentiful space and grew outward from its old core.  Animals in the old part of the zoo, such as elephants, lions, and polar bears, were relocated to new exhibits elsewhere.  Periodically, zoo leadership would make some noise about renovating the old zoo, known as the Main Valley, but every time they tried looking into it, the sheer cost and infrastructure challenges proved too daunting and they were scared off.  Instead, the Valley was eventually abandoned.  The entire front section of the zoo was closed down, with visitors bypassing it via a tram or a long walking trail to get to the newer part of the zoo.  I know of no other equivalent of it - a ghost zoo of empty cages, buildings, and holding yards sandwiched between the front gate and the "real" zoo, unseen and unwalked by the general public.

Until this week, that is.

On Tuesday, Maryland Zoo CEO Kirby Fowler ceremoniously reopened the Main Valley to the public - not as a set of new animal exhibits, but as a historical walkway, leading the visitors to the rest of the zoo.  Signage along the way highlights the evolution of the zoo and tells the stories of some of its past animals.

Granted, I go to see animals, not architecture, and all things being equal, I would have liked to have seen the Main Valley full of animals again, perhaps with species more suitable for the enclosures than those that lived there in the 1800s and 1900s.  All things are not equal, however, and, as Mr. Fowler's predecessors knew quite well, fixing up the dilapidated infrastructure would be a very expensive challenge.  It's one that I hope that Baltimore is up to meeting, one day.  In the meantime, however, I do appreciate that, if we can't have animals at this time, at least we're still given the chance to gain a better understanding of how they once live, and recommit ourselves to doing better by them.