Don't forget a stop to the Bronx Zoo if you are passing through New York and find yourself in the Bronx area. Mention the Bronx to most people, and they probably won’t think of it as a place to go for a family trip. The movies have created a negative image of this expansive borough of New York City that doesn’t quite square with the fact that it contains one of the world’s great treasures, the Bronx Zoo.

It lives up to its international accolades. More than 4,000 animals, many of them endangered, live here on 265 wooded acres—in the heart of the Bronx—in the biggest metropolitan wildlife conservation park in the country.

The Bronx Zoo opened 107 years ago, in November of 1899, as the New York Zoological Park. What was once a traditional, old-style zoo has embraced the modern zoo movement’s transition from cramped cages to complex open environments, and from displaying single specimens to maintaining herds and flocks of animals in conditions as natural as possible.

Now visitors get the best of both worlds. The glorious old Victorian zoo buildings, a pleasure to see, still stand, but have been reworked into other uses. The new buildings have been designed to fit in with the landscaping, and the meandering walkways provide vistas of the zoo’s inhabitants as they would appear in the wild. The Baboon Reserve, for instance, is a miniature Ethiopian hill environment that the baboons have the run of. Simulated dry riverbeds around its perimeter allow visitors to approach close enough to watch a troop of the primates act much as they would in nature, a great improvement over seeing a poor creature peering through the bars of its cage!

The grizzly bears have rocky caves and ledges, and the bison wander through open and shaded grassland. An enormous open-air sea bird aviary provides room to fly above a reproduced South American coastal island. And there’s the 6.5 acre Congo Gorilla Forest, an expansive home for the zoo’s gorillas, mandrills, okapis, red river hogs and African rock Pythons. Tiger Mountain’s three acres recreate the natural habitat of the Siberian tiger.

Another attraction is the guided monorail journey through the portion of the zoo set aside as the wild habitat of Asia. The elevated monorail provides an opportunity to view elephants, deer, even Siberian tigers and the amazing rhinoceros, from a vantage point that allows the animals to roam naturally below.

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