Denver Zoo

Within City Park lies the Denver Zoo, and its origin story starts with a single bear. In eighteen ninety-six, an orphaned black bear cub was captured on the Western Slope and sent by rail to a Denver passenger agent, who gave it to the city's Board of Park Commissioners. The cub was named Billy Bryan after the politician William Jennings Bryan, tied to a stake in City Park, and caused immediate trouble by raiding the park superintendent's chicken coop.

From that chaotic start grew a full zoological collection. The zoo made history again in nineteen eighteen when it opened Bear Mountain, one of the first naturalistic zoo exhibits in the country. Instead of iron bars, the designers used hidden moats and concrete rocks cast from molds taken from real outcrops near Morrison, Colorado.

The approach was so influential that zoos across the country adopted it in the years that followed. Today the zoo spreads across eighty acres, cares for about two thousand five hundred animals, and draws roughly one point eight million visitors a year, the most visited paid attraction in Denver. In twenty twenty-four the organization rebranded as Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance and acquired five hundred seventy acres in Weld County to expand its breeding and wildlife reintroduction programs.