Hub zoo deserves better than it gets

19 May 2004

I'm standing on a catwalk 10 feet in the air, eyeball to eyeball with Beau, a 1-ton giraffe that looks like the mascot from Toys-R- Us. Don't be fooled, I'm warned. One inadvertent swing of his head and I might find a few ribs broken.

Under instruction from trainer Suzy Kaplan, I grab a fistful of cut-up squash and gingerly hold it out. The animal maneuvers his mouth over, an impossibly long and blackish tongue snakes out, and suddenly the food is gone.

Beau should be dead right now, victim of a mysterious "wasting disease" once thought inevitably to be fatal. Yet he has survived - indeed, thrived - through the long winter, a small miracle wrought by Kaplan and other staff at the Franklin Park Zoo who refused to give up. It's typical of the zoo, I'm learning, a place that - like Beau - might easily have died but instead endures on a lot of dedication and not nearly enough money.

First opened 93 years ago, the one-time city zoo has seen more than its share of troubles. In the 1930s and 1940s it was a sensation, drawing over 1 million visitors a year. Then came World War II and severe budget cuts that saw the Monkey House closed and animals euthanized.

From there, things just got worse. Located far from downtown in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood, the zoo was always hard to get to and suffered further as the neighborhood became poorer and blacker and crime rates soared.

Annual attendance declined to around 100,000. As American zoos modernized, taking animals out of their cages and putting them into more naturalistic environments, Franklin Park stayed trapped in the past.

It lost its accreditation; in 1984 it was named one of America's 10 worst zoos.

The zoo fought back, however, opening the African Tropical Forest in 1989. It regained accreditation in 1994 and attendance climbed up to about 500,000. Still, there was turmoil. The state significantly cut funding two years ago and 12 percent of staff had to be laid off. A lion introduced into a new exhibit shockingly attacked and killed another lion. The zoo's board abruptly fired its CEO, Brian Rutledge. And then, of course, there was last September's incident with Little Joe, the adolescent gorilla who somehow climbed out of his enclosure and ran free, hurting two people, intimidating many others and getting a certain radio station into a lot a trouble.

And so it is that I find myself at the gates of Franklin Park, wondering. Is the place falling apart? Are people afraid to come, fearing some new attack? Are zoos a thing of the past?

In response, I get the persuasive and infectious enthusiasm of John Linehan, a man fresh out of college in 1981 who started working at Franklin Park as a laborer and is now CEO of Zoo New England, the agency that runs the Franklin Park and Stone zoos.

I am skeptical. Despite venerable exhibits such as the Tropical Forest or Birds World (where one enters into a gigantic aviary), my memory of Franklin Park is of bad food, long walks punctuated by uninteresting exhibits and a demeaning sense of humans on the outside mocking caged animals within.

No more. The bars are gone and there is a lot more to see. The park has added 30 exhibits since the mid-1990s, including African Wild Dogs, the Australian-themed Outback Trail, Serengeti Crossing (where zebras and ostriches run free), and a replica of a typical American farm (replete with sheep, chicks hatching and a barnyard cat). It is actively involved in breeding and saving endangered species. Even the food, Linehan promises, will soon improve.

All of this fits within his sense of the zoo's real mission, which is not to hold up trapped beasts as curiosities, but rather "conservation, education and recreation."

Yet Franklin Park still has the frayed and worn look of a once grand mansion whose owners have fallen on hard times. The lack of money shows.

"We were knocked back" by recent budget cuts, Linehan admits, and money remains his biggest worry.

But he's not passively complaining. The solution, he think, lies in attendance. Make the zoo more vital to more people and he would have an easier time with both state officials and private foundations in arguing his case. While attendance is better than it once was, "it should be a million," Linehan says.

To that end, this weekend marks the opening of Dinosaur World, a new exhibit that runs through the summer and recreates the Mesozoic era with life-size animatronic dinosaurs seemingly roaming the grounds. It's different and exciting and should draw large crowds. It's a new strategy as well, one that relies on special, limited- time shows as a means of generating interest and drawing people to the zoo for the first time.

"The zoo became a lost tradition," Linehan says. "Now it's like we're trying to break into a market."

If people try it once, he believes, they will keep on coming back

Talk back to Tom Keane at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.