The potential conflicts between zoos and parks, design and nature, were nowhere
more evident than in the work of the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Throughout
his distinguished career, Olmsted showed a pronounced ambivalence toward zoos, insisting
on their incompatibility with pastoral city parks while simultaneously trying to place them
creatively within the urban landscape. For example, he and his partner, Calvert Vaux, included
no public menagerie in their Greensward plan for Central Park because they believed
that a zoo, with its obtrusive buildings and milling crowds, would spoil the quiet
landscape effects they had worked so hard to achieve. After the ramshackle Central Park
Zoo more or less appeared, unbidden, in the early 1860s, Olmsted waged a thirty-year
campaign to remove or relocate it. As part of this effort, he and Vaux produced their own
“rural and park-like” plan for a zoological garden at Manhattan Square (where the American
Museum of Natural History now stands). In the plans they drafted for Chicago’s South
Park in 1871, Olmsted and Vaux argued against the construction of a traditional zoological