Missed a park visit Thursday, for the usual dumb reasons. Now that it's colder, more willpower is required. To tide ourselves over, here's a fine undated photo (1940s? 50s?) of the Prospect Park Zoo in its rather woeful middle incarnation (after the Victorian menagerie had been replaced by the current WPA-era structures, but before its 1993 renaissance as a humane, education-centered delight).
Image: Brooklyn Public Library archive
Love the expression on that parkie's face. (Compare to sea lion interaction with today's zoo staff here!) For a brief, marvelous memoir of the zoo in 1965, go here and listen as big-hearted* Brooklyn lawyer Kenneth P. Nolan recalls a summer job from hell that turned into something more:
So for minimum wage, a whopping $1.25 an hour, I cleaned tables, prepared
food and watched the thousands—blacks, Puerto Ricans, Hasidic Jews, ethnic
whites like myself—pour into this Depression era zoo on hot weekends because
they had nowhere else to go. With their kids running wild, they would stare at
the two pathetic polar bears or the unlucky seals in their pool or walk through
the stench of the monkey house where an old Parkie would whistle and one
mischievous monkey would hurl a piece of apple at the people. He rarely missed.
He was the good one. The bad monkey pissed on the visitors.
Rebuilt in 1935, the zoo was like Noah’s ark, only sad.
The piece deepens into a wise, funny, and poignant sketch of a lost time and place, much rougher in some ways (certainly on the animals) but far more civil in others. *(Mr. Nolan walks the walk when it comes to Brooklyn nostalgia, not least as a staunch supporter of Holy Name, his old Catholic parochial school, now attended by our daughter.) The story is on a site of non-fiction tales called Mr. Beller's Neighborhood that is new to me, but I will be returning there often. Like Nolan, I come from Irish forebears for whom "a story never loses."
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