A state charter, a director who picked the site and an 1899 opening.

The Bronx Zoo began as the project of a society rather than a city department. The Wildlife Conservation Society’s library history says the organisation was chartered by the State of New York on 26 April 1895 as the New York Zoological Society, with a mandate to advance wildlife conservation, promote the study of zoology and create a zoological park. It names Andrew H. Green, Henry Fairfield Osborn and Madison Grant among the founders and says Theodore Roosevelt and other New Yorkers were also involved. English Wikipedia says the founding group was made up largely of members of the Boone and Crockett Club.

The society says the zoo, then the New York Zoological Park, was designed along the lines of other New York cultural institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History, with the city providing the land and the society selecting the scientific and administrative staff. To build it, the society chose the naturalist William T. Hornaday, whom its history describes as already known as a founder of the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., now part of the Smithsonian. Hornaday chose the Bronx site and picked the curators and keepers who helped open the park on 8 November 1899.

The architecture set the tone early. Wikipedia says the firm Heins & LaFarge designed the original permanent buildings, known as Astor Court, as a series of Beaux-Arts pavilions grouped around a large circular sea lion pool. It says the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Astor Court buildings as a city landmark in 2000.

The society also had an emblem from its early years. Wikipedia says the New York Zoological Society’s seal was designed by the wildlife artist Charles R. Knight and showed a ram’s head and an eagle to reflect the society’s interest in preserving North American wildlife, and that the seal is no longer in use. Wikipedia also says Knight painted the zoo’s lion Sultan in 1905, and that Sultan was the model for the lion on top of the zoo’s Concourse gateway.

Paul Manship’s bronze gates at the Concourse entrance.

That gateway is the Paul J. Rainey Memorial Gates, and its official description comes from the city. The Landmarks Preservation Commission’s designation report, dated 11 January 1967, describes the gates at the Concourse entrance, facing Pelham Parkway, as monumental free-standing bronze gates designed to express animal and plant motifs. It says the sculptor Paul Manship chose a naturalistic style with stylised simplifications that was much admired in the 1920s and influenced by the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, and that the gates act as a transition from the concrete highway to the foliage of the park.

The report sets out how the design works. Manship made it read equally well from both sides by modelling the animal and plant forms in profile. A central post separating the two openings takes the form of a tree trunk rising in curves filled with birds, and ends in a seated lion framed by a burst of curves in which the branches turn into birds’ wings. The arched pediments above the two openings carry stylised animals that, the report says, were living at the zoo when the gates were designed. Bronze screens connect the gates to flanking granite lodges for the gatekeepers, each roofed with a single granite slab that the report puts at 26 tons.

The commission also gives the history. It says Manship began work in 1926 and spent five years on the design, expanding it from an original wrought-iron scheme into a full sculptural treatment in bronze, and that the casting of the gates and their surrounds was done in Belgium and took two years. The gates were a gift from Grace Rainey Rogers in memory of her brother Paul Rainey, a patron of the zoo whose expeditions, including one to the Arctic, brought it polar bears, walrus and musk oxen. They were dedicated in June 1934.

Recognition followed in two registers. The commission designated the gates a New York City landmark in 1967, after hearings at which a representative of the New York Zoological Society spoke in favour, and Wikipedia says they were added to the National Register of Historic Places on 16 March 1972. Wikipedia describes the style as Art Deco.

Seal, gates and lion as the zoo’s early visual vocabulary.

Zoos, aquariums and botanic gardens build their identities around living collections, and the marks they choose often show it: a single animal, a leaf, a flower or a fish drawn as a simple outline that can be cut into a gate, printed on a ticket and stitched onto a staff shirt. The drawing style matters as much as the subject. A fine scientific illustration suggests research and record-keeping, while a bold, flat silhouette reads from across a car park and scales down to a phone screen. Many institutions keep both, using a plain mark for the brand and a deeper library of illustrations for exhibits, guides and the shop.

The other half of the identity is the site itself. Visitors spend hours outdoors on paths that branch, loop and change with the seasons, so wayfinding carries much of the brand’s daily work: colour-coded zones, pictograms, distance markers and maps that double as souvenirs. Signage has to survive sun, rain, frost and curious hands, which pushes designers towards durable materials, high-contrast type and panels that can be replaced one at a time. Glasshouses, aviaries and enclosures often become the emblem, since a recognisable building can stand for the whole place on a poster or a postcard. Throughout, the brand balances two voices: the invitation to a family day out and the message about conservation, research and care for species and habitats, and the design has to let both speak without one drowning the other.

A society renames itself and its parks, 1993.

The society changed its own name almost a century after the opening. Its library history says the New York Zoological Society changed its name to the Wildlife Conservation Society in 1993. The change reached the parks too. An editorial in The Baltimore Sun on 13 February 1993 reported that the society had renamed itself NYZS/The Wildlife Conservation Society and the Bronx park the International Wildlife Conservation Park, and that the smaller New York sites had become the Central Park Wildlife Conservation Center, the Aquarium for Wildlife Conservation, the Queens Wildlife Conservation Center and the Prospect Park Wildlife Conservation Center.

The paper quoted the society’s president, William Conway, describing the new names as “highfalutin words”. Its own argument was about legibility: it said the two words Bronx Zoo told people what the place was and where it was, and predicted that subway signs would go on saying Bronx Zoo because that was how visitors would find it. The society’s own history today refers to the Bronx Zoo, formerly known as the New York Zoological Park, and it uses the Wildlife Conservation Society name, often shortened to WCS, for the organisation that runs it.

Conway’s career connects the name change to the zoo’s exhibits. The society says he became director of the Bronx Zoo in 1962 and president in 1992, promoted a view of zoos as conservation organisations that cooperated in breeding endangered species, and designed new types of exhibits meant to teach visitors about the habitats that support wildlife. It cites World of Birds and Wild Asia as examples.

For a design guide, the Bronx Zoo shows how an institution’s visual identity can live in its buildings — Beaux-Arts pavilions, a ram-and-eagle seal and a bronze lion on a gate — while its name moves from a learned society to a conservation mission and the public keeps using two short words. Compare the New York Botanical Garden, a neighbouring institution in the Bronx with its own guide, and the Smithsonian, whose National Zoo Hornaday helped to found. For this guide we use Manship bronze, Bronx Park green and Astor limestone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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