Ambitious Project Will Revamp Most Of The Denver Zoo
DENVER (CBS4) - The Denver Zoo is one of the city's proudest attractions, but its operators say parts of the 118-year-old facility are starting to show their age.
The zoo says it is in need of many major upgrades. It wants to add more than 30 new buildings without growing past its current 80 acre footprint in City Park. That has required some creative planning, and the staff is promising that visitors will love the changes that are in the works.
The ideas for major growth came after the zoo set out to build the new Elephant Passage, a $55 million exhibit that transformed a far corner of the zoo into its main attraction. It's the model for the new exhibits that could be even larger and cost even more.
The work on the project will stretch across a 20 year period. Denver Zoo Vice President for Design and Campus Management George Pond told CBS4 construction won't start for about a year, but by the time it's all over most of the zoo won't look anything like it does now.
"Once we're in to the next 15 years you're going to see a completely new zoo," Pond said.
One of the key components of the plan is that many of the walls separating animals that can live together will go away.
"If you can imagine an African exhibit with a multispecies habitat where the giraffes and the zebras and the rhinoceros are all out in the same yard and we've got education groups up in a treehouse," Pond said.
For visitors a trip to the zoo could one day feel like a voyage around the world -- from the shores of a coastal Alaskan village with polar bears and totem poles to an arid tree canopy on the Serengeti where students can learn about giraffes by looking them in the eye.
"We're going to saturate this whole campus with fantastic experiences for our guests," Pond said.
So far the overall cost of the project hasn't been stated, but if previous work is any indication it could cost more than $100 million.
The zoo is now working for figure out how to fund the project.
LINK: Denver Zoo
