Henry Doorly Zoo: How Omaha Became a World Capital of Conservation

The zoo that became world-famous started as a modest city attraction in Riverview Park in eighteen ninety-four, an afterthought in a municipal park on the Missouri River bluffs. For the first sixty years of its existence it was a respectable midsize zoo, unremarkable by national standards.

The transformation arrived in nineteen sixty-three with a bequest from Margaret Hitchcock Doorly. She donated in honor of her late husband Henry Doorly, a newspaper publisher who had built the Omaha World-Herald into one of the most influential papers in the Midwest. The donation did not simply add an exhibit or an endowment. It reoriented the institution's entire ambition.

Over the following decades the zoo built structures that had no precedent anywhere in the world. The Lied Jungle, which opened in nineteen ninety-two, became one of the world's largest indoor rainforests, a glass-and-steel building holding more than one hundred twenty thousand square feet of tropical habitat across three continents. The Desert Dome, opened in two thousand two, houses the world's largest indoor desert under the world's largest glazed geodesic dome. The Scott Aquarium expanded the zoo's reputation into marine life.

In two thousand fourteen, TripAdvisor's algorithmic ranking of two hundred seventy-five major zoos worldwide placed Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo first, ahead of the San Diego Zoo, ahead of every institution in Europe. It was not a fluke. By two thousand twenty-six the zoo had been named the best in the United States for four consecutive years by USA Today's readers.

There is something instructive about this. The finest zoo in the world, by many measures, is in a midwestern city of half a million people, built on a nineteenth-century park bequest and a sixty-year-old naming gift, and it got there by thinking bigger than anyone thought the location required.