NEH Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections Grant

The WCS Archives is thrilled to announce that we’ve been awarded a Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections Planning Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  This grant will allow us to develop the WCS Archives Conceptual Preservation Design Plan. Founded upon preservation strategies that balance effectiveness, cost, and environmental impact, the plan will serve as a crucial first step in the Archives’ development of a new space to preserve our unique historical collections.  Continue reading

Scan by Scan: Digitizing the Photographic Record of the Department of Tropical Research

1005-20-01-0322The Bronx Zoo itself is a nostalgic place for many people (myself included), where lifelong memories are made from childhood onward, and close-up animal experiences make nature come alive. It may sound like a cliché, but then again who among us can recall their favorite part of the zoo and not be overwhelmed by affection for the animals found there? My own longtime favorite part of the zoo as a kid was the (now closed) World of Darkness. So, as you can see here, the zoo and I go back quite a ways. Continue reading

A Jungle in the Bronx

1028-Exhibits-JW-19850621-ProgramThirty years ago today, the Bronx Zoo’s JungleWorld exhibit opened to the public.  Posed in the 1985 NYZS Annual Report as an “experiment” that built upon decades of innovations in zoogeographic exhibition, JungleWorld sought to break new ground in wild animal care and exhibition, and it was widely considered the most ambitious indoor zoological environment ever created at the time.  Continue reading

Happy Birthday, Helen Martini!

Image of Helen Martini with baby panther in her Bronx apartment, circa 1940s. Scanned from WCS Photo Collection

Image of Helen Martini with baby panther in her Bronx apartment, circa 1940s. Scanned from WCS Photo Collection

Today marks what would have been Helen Martini’s 103rd birthday. For more on her and on this great photo, check out WCS’s Photo Blog, Wild View.

Conservation of another kind

MS_150311_0490-edit-resized.jpgAs its name implies, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) holds the conservation of wildlife and wild places as its central mission.  Not surprisingly, many of the posts here on “Wild Things”—the blog for the WCS Archives—highlight WCS’s historical conservation efforts.  This post, however, features a different kind of ‘conservation’: recent work performed on some of the Archives’ own materials. Continue reading

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The Rainey Gates [part 3]

KH_JimmyThis post was written by Kimio Honda,  Studio Manager in WCS’s Exhibition and Graphic Arts Department. This is the third part of a three-part series on the Bronx Zoo’s Rainey Gates; for part 1, on Paul J. Rainey, see here, and for part 2, on the development of the Gates, see here.

While working on the Rainey Gates, Paul Manship was able to sculpt from the animals at the Bronx Zoo, as they were brought into a special studio—likely the artists’ studio that sat at the northeastern corner of the Lion House. (See our previous post on the studio.)  The animals featured in the gates were chosen from the actual zoo collection. Some of them were well-known characters.  Continue reading