New Zoo

Six lions, two tigers, two cougars, an Indian leopard, a male buffalo, a rhinoceros named Toodles, an elephant named Nancy, an agouti, a coati-mundi and some 300 other kinds of beast, bird & fish used to be on view in Coalman George Fulmer Getz's zoo at Holland, Mich. This week a larger public may look at them when with grunts, growls, roars, squeals and speeches the Chicago Zoological Society opens its new, 133-acre zoo at Brookfield, 15 mi. southwest of Chicago.

Current fashion in zoo-building is to put animal comfort first, make everything look as unzooish as possible. Like rural Whipsnade in England (TIME, June 18), Chicago's zoo goes easy on fences. Visitors will tingle at the sight of lions, elephants and bears padding in the open over imitation rock (cement sprayed on steel laths), but they will be safe behind invisible moats 12 1/2 ft. deep & wide.

An Italian motif dominates the 22 buildings of Indiana limestone and white-washed brick. In the blue of a long pond glitter the glass & aluminum of two bird houses and a reptile house. A bug house, first in the U. S., is half completed. It will hold everything from amebas to high invertebrates.

All told, it has taken six years to build the zoo, cost Illinois taxpayers some $3,000,000. The late Edith Rockefeller McCormick gave much of the land. When most of the buildings were finished last year, the Society's President John Tinney McCutcheon, famed Chicago Tribune cartoonist, and Zoo Director Edwin Howard Bean started looking for something to put in them. The Society had decided to pay for the animals itself. George Getz. new treasurer of the Republican National Committee, helped out by making a gift of his menagerie, worth $60,000. The U. S. Department of the Interior sent three grizzly bears. Wheat Speculator Thomas Montgomery Howell gave three albatrosses which, hand-fed four times a day, had last week broken all records by staying alive six weeks in captivity. The Society has paid $100,000 for the rest of its 600 mammals, 1,500 birds, 500 reptiles. Sample prices: lion, $250; Maribou stork, $35; chimpanzee, $400; elephant, $4,000; giraffe, $3,500 (three for $7,500). All in one batch, for $11,000. the Society bought from an Australian zoo 1,200 birds, 300 reptiles, and 200 mammals, mostly kangaroos. From Minneapolis for $250 the zoo got Mrs. Grace Olive Wiley's famed collection of snakes, and for an unnamed sum Mrs. Wiley herself to take care of them and the rest of its reptiles. Only person ever to breed rattlesnakes in captivity, Mrs. Wiley finds her charges "simply adorable," likes to sit sewing with a rattlesnake coiled in her lap "like a contented old cat."

At the opening this week the distinguished visitors' attention will be especially directed to a baby fringe-eared oryx antelope, a matchie tree kangaroo which looks like a small brown bear and a Hycean tiger from Turkestan.

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