A Googie Zoo for L.A.

 

May 13, 1957
Los Angeles

Let's suppose you have a large parcel of property near downtown Los Angeles bordered by the Pasadena, Golden State and Hollywood Freeways, then known as the "Industrial Freeway." To be sure, you could put a Major League Baseball team there.

 

Or you could build the world's largest zoo, which is what architects Vernon Duckett and his partner Mr. Jenkins of Duckett & Jenkins proposed as a replacement for the facility in Griffith Park. I love this design; so 1950s and crazy. A Googie Zoo!!

 

The zoo would be divided into five zones, the Holarctic, South America, Southeast Asia, Australia and Africa, and would use natural barriers, moats, streams, simulated cliffs and camouflaged steel wires.

 

The Times noted that construction of the zoo depended on the passage of Proposition B, which would set aside $6.6 million for the project.

 

And in case you're curious, Dodger Stadium would have been somewhere in the Southeast Asia section.