Vintage Central Park Zoo

Bill Snyder and Hattie the Elephant posing in Central Pak New York.

No zoo was envisaged in Olmsted and Vaux's original "Greensward" design for Central Park, but the Central Park menagerie evolved from gifts of exotic pets and other animals informally given to the Park, beginning, apparently, with a bear and some swans deposited near New York's arsenal on the edge of Central Park in 1859. In 1864 it received charter confirmation from New York's assembly. The informally developed menagerie was at first housed in the Arsenal building that predated the Park, located at Fifth Avenue facing East 64th Street. It was given more permanent quarters behind the Arsenal building in 1870. When the Central Park Menagerie was officially founded in 1864, it was the United States's second publicly owned zoo, after the Philadelphia Zoo, founded in 1859.

In 1934, to properly house the zoo, neo-Georgian brick and limestone zoo buildings ranged in a quadrangle round the sea lion pool were designed by Aymar Embury II, architect for the Triborough Bridge and the Henry Hudson Bridge. The famous sea lion pool itself was originally designed by Charles Schmieder. For its day the sea lion pool was considered advanced because the architect actually studied the habits of sea lions and incorporated this knowledge into the design.