Washington Park Zoo: Built by the New Deal on a Sand Dune

The Washington Park Zoo in Michigan City got its start in nineteen twenty-eight when the fire department ran out of room for the cast-off exotic animals that kept arriving in town. The city appointed an official zoo board and moved everything to fifteen acres of sand dune overlooking Lake Michigan. Then the Depression hit, and the Works Progress Administration moved in.

The WPA designed and landscaped the entire zoo, making it believed to be the only zoo in Indiana designed and landscaped entirely by New Deal labor programs. Workers constructed the monkey island, brick shelters, a rock garden with a waterwheel, and a four-story Art Deco observation tower that rises eighty feet above the dune. The tower is topped with a steel sphere salvaged from the city's first fire engine.

The zoo is still free and still operating on that same dune.