From 1899 to 1914, people around the world gave over 12,000 animals to the New York Zoological Park in the Bronx (almost 5,000 of them were snakes) .  Donations to the zoo fulfilled two purposes: they supplied the zoological park with more animals, and, perhaps more importantly, helped the zoo form a relationship with certain communities around them. This project is a focused look at a section of these animal donors, the people of New York City. What creatures did New Yorkers give to the zoo, and where did they get the animals? Who took the time to convey a captured opossum, a single pigeon, or the occasional coyote to the Bronx, and why? My goal is to try and understand what the archival record of animal donations can tell us about the way people in the city related to the animals around them, and to the new zoo.

Many of the animals donated to the zoo were common in the New York City area — robins, turtles, raccoons, and unwanted household pets that were ferried by subway, on foot, and through the mail to the gates of the park. By mapping what these animals were and who donated them, I hope to shed some light on why the zoo might have accepted them into their otherwise more internationally-sourced collection.

Ostensibly designed to teach city-dwellers about nature, the Bronx Zoo took 261 acres of land used by local residents for hunting, foraging, and recreation, and turned it into a patchwork of manicured lawns dotted with neo-classical buildings and animal cages. When the zoo opened in 1899, the founding administration characterized the Bronx park as doing for nature what the Metropolitan Museum did for art or the American Museum of Natural History for the natural sciences — it would bring nature’s “wonders and beauties within reach of thousands and millions of all classes who cannot travel or explore”.[2] William Hornaday, the zoo’s director from 1896 to 1926, purchased most of the zoo’s animals from a robust network of collectors and dealers who operated in the western United States and colonially-occupied regions of Africa, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. How did animals found in New York City fit into the more globally-oriented scheme of Bronx Zoo planning? This digital humanities project is a first look at how the zoo used these gifts to form relationships with potential patrons, the zoo-going public, and urban animals.

What follows is a product of the COVID-19 pandemic, in both archival content and format. When New York City, where I live, went into various phases of lockdown and I could not focus enough to write my intended dissertation on the global context of the Bronx Zoo and the history of ecology, I took an obsessive dive into digital sources. The archival core of the project is a handful of documents I was able to gather before libraries were shuttered: the New York Zoological Society’s records of “Gift Acknowledgements” from 1913-1914, held in the Wildlife Conservation Society Library and Archives (the New York Zoological Society changed its name to the Wildlife Conservation Society in 1993). These files list the name of each donor, the donor’s address, and the animal(s) given. Zoo administrators used this information to thank each donor personally with a letter, and to publicly recognize their contribution in the Society’s Annual Report.

To contextualize these donations, I used historic insurance maps and GIS software to plot all 342 New York City donors from 1913 and 1914 onto a map of the metropolitan area. After placing the donors (and the 785 animals they gave) into the city where they lived, I then cross-referenced each person with census data, historic city directories, digitized newspaper articles, scientific articles, and nature guides. The result is a series of maps that reveal relationships between the Bronx Zoo and certain neighborhoods, between multiple donors, and between animals and the physical lay-out of the city.

This project is a facet of my more extensive research on the logistics of animal collection and display. Zoos are institutions with complicated (and often concealed) ties to politics, environmental care, and ideas about the natural world. My goal is to piece together the role zoos in the United States played in shaping ideas about race, immigration, gender, and U.S. territorial expansion. In tracing the animals gifted to the zoo, I hope to add to scholarship that interprets nonhuman animals as individuals with their own histories, instead of abstractions that represent an entire species or region.[4]

Well-timed technical and financial support for this project was provided by a grant from the  Polonsky Foundation-NYU Digital Humanities Internship Program. 

The brown thrasher Mr. L. Def. Downer donated to the Zoological Park might have originated in Tompkins Square Park, only a block away from Downer's house. The Central American boa his neighbor Joe Naegelen donated almost certainly did not (although in New York anything is possible). Here are a few examples of what was given:

In total, New Yorkers gave the zoo 785 living animals in 1913 and 1914. The chart below shows what these animals were. Most were small creatures, such as local snakes, young alligators purchased from pet stores, and songbirds, which were relatively easy to find and transport to the park. The large number of snakes donated might be due in part to the zoo’s willingness to accept them (they used them for new exhibits and as food for snake-eating snakes), and by some people’s enthusiasm for catching them, spurred on by Ditmars’ guide to New York City snakes (see above slideshow).

Below, you will find a map that plots the addresses of all of the people who gave living gifts to the Bronx Zoo in 1913 and 1914. Click on individual points to learn more about each gift, or use the buttons to the left of the map to see where the animals most likely came from. The location of the New York Zoological Park is highlighted in pink. Blue dots indicate donors that have more historical context associated with them.

I have divided the animals into what I call "Categories of Origin." These are speculative, the archival record gives very few glimpses into the lives of most of these creatures before they reached the zoo.

Local Collections are animals that were known to be found in the wilds of New York City and the area immediately surrounding it.

Wonders & Beauties are animals that came from elsewhere, brought to New York City by leisure travelers, animal dealers, and (in one case) a silent film company.

Stowaways were donated by people who worked on ships or at companies with international outposts.

The category of Pets & Breeders includes animals typically sold by pet stores at the time, or animals bred by specialists for other purposes. Parrots are in this section because they were a pet store mainstay, even though some of these birds were brought into the city by individual travelers. The distinction between Local Collections and Pets is the trickiest, as many pet stores sold locally collected animals (such as painted turtles).

Primates and Alligators are in their own categories due to my curiosity. Both were commonly found in pets stores and/or taken as souvenirs during tropical vacations. Many alligator owners in New York City purchased them from reptile farms in Florida. Primates were always imported from Africa or the tropical Americas, often at a very young age, as no one in the early 20th century successfully bred them.

As you zoom out of the map, patterns of donations emerge. Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island had far fewer donors than Manhattan and the Bronx. Stowaways came from the piers, where the boats that brought them were docked. People within walking distance of the Zoological Park were more likely to donate locally-sourced animals, while Manhattanites gave the majority of primates and other exotic creatures. Within Manhattan, the neighborhoods of Midtown and the Upper West Side had particularly dense clusters of donors (more on this later).

All animal names are used as-printed by the Zoological Society in 1913 and 1914. Some are no longer in use today or are spelled differently.

Zoom in closer to pinpoint individuals, or click around while zoomed out to see information about donors and their immediate neighbors. [14]

To understand more about who gave animals to the zoo, I turned to 1910 census data. Although imperfect, overlaying donor addresses onto census results about race and what the census called nativity (place of birth) gives an idea of how zoo donors were situated within immigrant and racial communities in New York City (for more on the context of the 1910 census see Paul Schor’s book Counting Americans). [15]

The 1910 census continued a line of questioning begun in 1850 that was designed to track the nation’s growing immigrant population. In addition to asking about a person’s “color or race” and the number of children they had, census enumerators recorded the place of birth of each respondent, as well as the place of birth of both of their parents. Census tabulators then used this information to figure a number of different statistics that looked at race, nativity, and reproduction together (see these census reports  here ).

In the boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island, there were not enough donors to make any correlations to census data. In the Bronx, proximity to the zoo spurred more donations than any affinities to 1910 demographic categories. But a pattern emerged in Manhattan — most donors were clustered in the Upper West Side, Midtown, and around Wall Street. These were the neighborhoods that, according to census tabulators, had the highest concentrations of people categorized as “native born white of native born parents” in the borough. In other words, people who gave animals to the zoo at this time lived in the areas of Manhattan that were densely populated by white people who had been in the United States for at least two generations (see Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian for more on the appropriation of “native-ness” & indigeneity by settlers in the U.S.).[17] Donors were notably sparse in areas with high densities of new and first generation immigrant populations, such as the Lower East Side.

These findings are significant for two reasons. First, of the roughly 2,300,000 people who lived in Manhattan in 1910, only a small percentage of them were considered to be “native born white of native born parents” (15.8%, compared to 35.4% for New York State).[19] In a city composed primarily of immigrants and the children of immigrants, it’s notable that many zoo donors were likely to be otherwise.

Second, at this time Bronx Zoo administrators publicly promoted a white supremacist and nativist agenda. The New York Zoological Society was run by Henry Fairfield Osborn (president), Madison Grant (chairman of the executive committee), and William Hornaday (director of the zoo). Grant and Osborn were leading anthropological authorities of the time and are today considered to be the founding figures of the eugenics movement in the United States.[20] The three men wrote influential publications, including Grant’s now-notorious Passing of a Great Race (1916), that stoked fears of white racial decline and equated “non-Nordic” people with invasive pests.[21] Their books, pamphlets, and lectures promoted the idea that old-stock white communities had a special claim to land in the United States, and cast Indigenous and Black people, as well as new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, as destructive poachers and poor stewards of increasingly imperiled wildlife. Through their involvement in the American Defense Society, Grant and Hornaday lobbied Congress to pass the Immigration Act of 1924 that instituted restrictive quotas based on national origins in ways that significantly limited non-European immigration to the United States.

While the role of the New York Zoological Society in shaping environmental conservation legislation is well known today, the institution’s involvement in the construction of racialized immigration laws is less so. It is my hope that tracing donors to the zoo will allow me to understand what kind of community the Zoological Society cultivated in the metropolitan area, and help piece together the historical connections between environmental conservation and immigration law in the United States.

A note about the 1910 census: Tabulations of statistics about New York State published by the Bureau of the Census were overwhelmingly focused on whiteness. Charts, maps, and explanatory texts repeatedly analyze ratios of foreign-born to U.S.-born white citizens and the origins of foreign-born white immigrants, while saying next to nothing about the more than 65,000 people in Manhattan and the Bronx categorized as “Negro” or “Other.” For this (and other glaring omissions), I use the 1910 census more as an indicator of white nativist anxiety, and tread cautiously when reading it as a historical source about the people of New York City in the early 20th century.

This research is in its beginning stages. I share it with you now in part to experiment with digital mapping as a method for historical questioning. When archival access returns, I plan to expand the map to include donors from beyond New York City, and incorporate information about the relative abundance or scarcity of historic animal populations.