Friday, October 29, 1999
Elephants get room to roam
Zoo almost through with $6 million renovation
BY JIM KNIPPENBERG
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Jack Huelsman is convinced: “This is the lap of luxury. At least if you're an elephant.”
Mr. Huelsman, associate director of the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, is in charge of the $6 million renovation of the zoo's 1903 Elephant House. The project began last October and continues today in preparation for a May 2000 reopening as Vanishing Giants.
Mr. Huelsman knows his elephant haunts. In the past two years, he has visited at least eight, taking photos and notes, sketching and trying to see “what they were doing right and wrong. Then I adapted it for us.
“I'd say we're two-thirds there. See? The new walls are mostly in, landscaping is going in, and just this week they started building the rock formations. It's really starting to look like something.”
The Vanishing Giants house has already been reconfigured inside — turned around, if you will. The exterior of the building (listed on the National Register of Historic Places) will get fresh paint of deep reds, browns and beiges, but no significant changes.
In the yard, zoo horticulturist Dave Ehrlinger is well on his way to turning the former elephant parking lot and part of the giraffe lot into a mini-Africa and Asia. He's doing it with plantings such as tall grasses and shrubs that aren't necessarily native to the continents but look like plants that are.
The renovation is transforming an old-fashioned exhibit where visitors stand and stare at animals plucked from their environment and dropped into ours, into a modern immersion exhibit. That is, visitors will now enter the animal's environment and watch them behave as they would in the wild.
It's the same idea behind the zoo's Jungle Trails exhibit, which has become one of its most popular exhibits since opening in 1993.
It was also necessary.
The old elephant compound was inadequate, according to the American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZAA), which sets standards for U.S. zoos. Those standards dictate that a herd the size of Cincinnati's five elephants have 9,113 square feet outdoors and 2,000 indoors.
The old facility had 4,601 square feet and was occupied by elephants, giraffes and okapi. The elephants' share was 2,756 square feet outside and 864 indoors. The new compound quadruples inside space and increases outdoor space to more than 24,000 square feet.
Because of that space crunch, the zoo's five elephants have been temporarily relocated: Four of them — My-Thai, Princess Schottzie II, Jati and baby Ganesh — share the old Ape House. The fifth, Sabu, is in Louisville, waiting out the renovation.
By any measure — commitment of land, commitment of money — it's the zoo's second largest project ever, right behind Jungle Trails but ahead of Manatee Springs and Wings of the World.
Consider the rehab job:
• The interior has been reconfigured: In the past, visitors entered one end and walked down a long corridor, looking at animals on each side, then exited at the opposite end.
There's no central corridor anymore: Visitors will enter one side and come face to face with the elephant compound, now the full width of the house — 3,712 square feet, four times more indoor space than in the past. Except for cosmetics, this part is nearly finished.
To see the giraffes and okapi, visitors will exit, walk around the building and enter the other side. These compounds also are side to side, each getting about half the width of the building. This area is also nearly finished.
• Separating the compounds is a wide corridor and large rooms that serve as animal bedrooms. They're roughed in, but not complete.
• The basement has been redone and is pretty much finished. “We've expanded it considerably,” Mr. Huelsman says. “It will be used for food storage and preparation, plus cleanup facilities — you know, a poop chute.”
• Outdoors, three new yards take up what used to be a parking lot and a half, plus the entire elephant, giraffe and okapi yards.
Now, where yellow lines on faded blacktop once marked boundaries, there are trails winding among pools, baby trees catching a foothold in what Mr. Ehrlinger describes as “awful soil,” and 4- and 5- foot mounds of earth topped with exotic plantings.
“They do look exotic, don't they?” Mr. Ehrlinger says. “They aren't. Almost nothing from the animals' habitat would live through winter, so we selected plantings that look like the African variety but can survive our climate.”
Hearty magnolias, looking every bit as Southern as the delicate tropical variety, line one path. Tall grasses native to North America but looking right at home in a bamboo forest, line another. So does a form of bamboo known to survive most any winter thrown at it.
“The other consideration was taste. We need plants that taste bad, or the animals eat them,” he said, pointing at the bitter leaves of a Catalpa, a squat, deep green leafy shrub. They stand near a crop of pyracantha, similar to those in landscaping all over town.
Mr. Ehrlinger used to taste all the plants himself. “But I get too queasy now,” he says. “I just smell them and know.”
@subhed:Terraced yard
@rbody:
• The elephant yard, a terraced affair of 24,862 square feet. Its upper tier, still a long way from finished, will resemble a dusty savannah full of rock outcroppings, sparse trees and trampled dirt.
The lower tier looks more like a lush jungle. An 8-foot deep, approximately 60,000-gallon pool is already in place, as are hundreds of plantings.
The jungle is so lush that roads — Erkenbrecher Avenue, Vine Street, service roads — will no longer be visible.
• Nor will many restraints be visible, including the moats. Already in place, they're sheer cliffs on the visitor side and a gentle slope on the animal side. Cliffs can't be seen from the viewing points; only the slopes are visible.
Split rail fences of African locust wood will keep visitors away from the moat.
Thanks to the size of the new yard, “You're going to see something you've never seen here at the zoo,” Mr. Huelsman says. “An elephant running.”
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