Look at the main gate of Lincoln Park Zoo and notice what isn't there. No ticket window. No turnstile. Nobody scanning anything. You walk in the way you'd walk into a park, and it has worked like that since eighteen sixty-eight.
The whole institution started as a gift from New York. The commissioners of Central Park sent Chicago two pairs of swans. Four birds. That was the entire founding collection of what is now one of the oldest zoos in North America. The swans arrived with a letter of care instructions. It noted that one of the males would come at you if you got between him and the water.
Chicago put the swans on the pond and decided it had a zoo. Then it started collecting, with the enthusiasm of a city that had no idea what it was doing. The first animal this place ever actually bought was a bear cub, in eighteen seventy-four, for ten dollars. The cub turned out to be an exceptional climber and was repeatedly found wandering around Lincoln Park after dark. Ten dollars, and Chic
ago had purchased itself a nocturnal bear problem.
Four years later the commissioners did the thing that actually matters. In eighteen seventy-eight they resolved that this collection would stay free to the public — free as a permanent condition of its existence. They wrote it down.
Consider when they wrote it. Eighteen seventy-eight. The city was seven years out from the fire and still rebuildi
