Griffith Park Zoo (Closed) Film footage of Griffith Park Zoo

[DavidBrown]

For people interested in the history of the Los Angeles Zoo, here is something cool that our friend @snowleopard found.

Before 1966 when the current LA Zoo opened, there was a prior zoo in Griffith Park a mile or so away in another part of the park. It is a picnic area now and some old exhibits remain to show what the old zoo looked like. There is a photo gallery of it here on Zoochat: Griffith Park Zoo (Closed) - ZooChat

The 1948 Burt Lancaster film called Kiss the Blood Off My Hands has a scene filmed at the Griffith Park Zoo that shows a good chunk of the zoo as it was - sea lion exhibit, monkeys, chimps, and big cats. The cat cages are still there, but most of the old zoo is gone now. It is interesting to see what the old zoo looked like.

The movie is here and the zoo scene starts at 18 minutes:
1948 - Kiss The Blood Off My Hands - Sangre en las manos - Norman Foster - VOSE : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

 

[snowleopard]

The California sea lion pool looks decent (for its era), but the rest of the zoo has cages that are shockingly small. There is some cool footage in the film, including the animals that are mentioned above but also a brachiating gibbon and a black bear. In 2017, I toured the remaining cages of the old Griffith Park Zoo, but it's really neat to see the 1940s version with actual animals in the enclosures.

 

[Coelacanth18]

Weird dialogue and acting aside, that's a very neat historical snapshot. So much of the original zoo has disappeared in the intervening decades. Are the remnants of that giant concrete sea lion pool even there anymore?

 

[DavidBrown]

Weird dialogue and acting aside, that's a very neat historical snapshot. So much of the original zoo has disappeared in the intervening decades. Are the remnants of that giant concrete sea lion pool even there anymore?

I've been to the old zoo site several times and never seen anything resembling the sea lion pool. If one knew exactly where to look for it, perhaps there is some remnant, but it is not obvious.

The only thing from the film that I recognized as still being at the site are the cat cages. I was told by Michael Dee, the much-missed late former general curator of the LA Zoo, that a lot of the cages like the primate cages and aviaries at the old zoo site were deconstructed and used to patch up the new zoo site over the years.