I think I'm right in saying that these cages were originally home to great apes - that is, if they're on the opposite side of the house to the hippo pool. Never saw apes there myself, but extraordinary to think that this was once considered acceptable.
It's a nice example of how a zoo can prosper when having creative and innovative people in charge, and how it can fall back once these people are gone...
On a personal note: the zoo had one of the tamest pronghorn bucks I've encountered so far.
I visited Topeka quite a while ago - maybe 20 years or so. I liked it a lot; as Sun Wukong says, the creativity and innovation which was brought along by Gary Clarke was evident, but this was sadly seeping away and - as i understand it - the era into which the zoo was heading at that time was not so good. Having read a piece about the Animals and Man building in an old International Zoo Yearbook, I must say I loved this building - even if it is, in pretty much every way, pretty horrible in a modern zoo. I liked the fact that Topeka seemed to be a very American, small-town zoo. And I like the whole small-town America thing: friendly people who tried very hard to overcome their suspicion of me because (at the time) I had very long hair and lots of bits of metal in my ears. There's a great Loretta Lynn song called "One's One The Way" in which Topeka is used to represent 'boring' America, in contrast to the coastal glamour ("Here in Topeka, the rain keeps falling"). I loved it!
I did a piece for International Zoo News back in around 1990 or 1991 about the zoos of Topeka, Kansas City, Omaha and St Louis.
