Indianapolis Zoo: How a City Reinvented Its Riverfront Around Animals
Near Indianapolis, Indiana
The Indianapolis Zoo sits on sixty-four acres along the White River, just west of downtown, and the fact that it sits there at all is the result of a deliberate decision, in the early nineteen eighties, to transform a post-industrial riverfront into the heart of a new urban park.
The zoo itself began in nineteen sixty-four as the Washington Park Children's Zoo on East Thirtieth Street, a modest city zoo with the usual limitations of landlocked urban parks. By the early nineteen eighties, its leadership wanted more: more space, a more visible location, and a role as something beyond a weekend destination.
The site they chose was along the White River, which for most of Indianapolis's history had been an overlooked industrial backwater, a place for factories, not for families. In nineteen eighty-two, the Indiana General Assembly created White River State Park, the unusual concept of a state park embedded in a major city. The Indianapolis Zoo would be its anchor attraction.
Groundbreaking came in September of nineteen eighty-five. Workers rerouted Washington Street to accommodate the new grounds, building a pedestrian bridge across the river to connect the zoo to the downtown core. On June eleventh, nineteen eighty-eight, the new Indianapolis Zoo opened to seven thousand people, with fireworks and twenty thousand released balloons.
The park that grew up around it over the following decades became one of the more successful examples of urban riverfront transformation in the Midwest, adding the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, the Indiana State Museum, the NCAA Hall of Champions, and Victory Field baseball park, all within walking distance.
The zoo itself became notable for its biome approach, organizing exhibits around climate zones rather than species origin, and for its conservation research programs. It is today one of the few major American zoos that receives no government funding, sustained entirely by admission, memberships, and private support.
