Bronx Zoo Restoration--Advancing into the future, while respecting the past.

An intimidating jaguar carved by eminent sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington guards a boxwood-striped Italian Garden at the Bronx Zoo’s circa-1900 Astor Court.

The Bronx Zoo’s image in the public mind now is largely primeval. Visitors best remember glimpsing exotic herds and flocks nestled into simulated savannahs, Himalayan plateaus or rainforests – any architecture onsite pales by comparison. But one of the city’s most cohesive Beaux-Arts complexes, on par with Columbia University’s campus, lies little known at the heart of the zoo’s 265 acres. Called Astor Court, the Neoclassical ensemble contains half a dozen circa-1900 structures plus balustrades, boxwood beds, grottoes and a sea-lion pool. The master plan and most of the buildings were designed by Heins & La Farge, a firm best known for colorfully tiled subway stations. The court’s façades are a study in varied peachy-orange shades of Roman brick and stone or terra-cotta animals. The species portrayed – including reptiles, monkeys, pachyderms and big cats – once lived in cages along the court, and millions of visitors annually strolled the balustraded paths.

Now restored to its original condition, Astor Court’s monumental double staircase is a medley of scalloped grottoes, garlanded plinths, brick and stone pavers, and terra-cotta balusters.

By the 1980s, the wildlife had been moved to roomier habitats elsewhere, and offices took over much of Astor Court. Its most ornate landmark, the Lion House, lay fallow while the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which is headquartered at the zoo, runs four other zoological parks in town and employs thousands of naturalists worldwide, pondered reuse options.

“It was such a shame to have such a beautiful building not open to the public, to not have life in it for our guests,” says Susan A. Chin, WCS’s director of planning. For six years, she has been overseeing conversion of the Lion House into a mini-Madagascar, complete with pliable rubber tree branches for lemurs to leap along and rockwork-walled tanks for 13-ft.-long crocodiles. Throughout the rest of Astor Court, meanwhile, a Chin-led team has recreated a Beaux-Arts landscape that, as Building Conservation Associates (BCA) project manager Claudia Kavenagh puts it, “had been altered over the years on an as-needed basis. It had lost a lot of its original logic and sense of place. WCS asked us to help them turn it back into a destination.”

The court originally was a place where the elite – socialites, politicians and other celebrities – liked to be seen on balmy afternoons. The New York Times would cover their visits breathlessly, and report on the arrivals, births, escapes, surgeries and deaths of popular animals. Guests entered near Astor Court via the Rainey Memorial Gates, which Paul Manship sculpted in bronze with bears, deer, monkeys, owls and herons. Of all Astor Court’s attractions, however, The Times called the Lion House “the handsomest building,” as well as the most technologically advanced: “It has every possible modern improvement, many of its features being entirely novel.”
The stone jaguars now watch over the restored brick and stone pavement rectangles that flank central diamonds in the staircase’s original patterns.

Wire mesh, rather than the standard depressing bars, fronted the cages. Pneumatic pumps powered the heating system. Elevators, pulleys and floor-mounted tracks allowed caged cats to be safely moved throughout the 192-ft.-long building. Skylights as well as tile murals of jungles and deserts reminded the lions, leopards, tigers, pumas, cheetahs and jaguars a little of the great outdoors.