Los Angeles Zoo

Los Angeles got its first zoo in nineteen twelve, a scrappy collection of animals in Griffith Park near the current merry-go-round. By the nineteen sixties that old zoo was a civic embarrassment, its cages cramped and crumbling. The city voted to build a proper facility and hired architect Charles Luckman to design a new zoo on eighty acres further north in the park.

It opened on November twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-six, with more than two thousand animals and a price tag of ten million dollars. The California condor breeding program launched here in the nineteen eighties became one of the most consequential conservation efforts in American history, pulling the species back from as few as about twenty-two individuals to hundreds flying free today. The zoo now covers more than one hundred thirty acres and is accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.