“How is Brookfield Zoo Marking International Red Panda Day?” by S.M. O’Connor

Today, Saturday, September 21, 2019 is International Red Panda Day. Over the past twenty years, the global population of red pandas has declined by 50%. There seem to be fewer than 10,000 of them in the wild. Brookfield Zoo in west suburban Brookfield, Illinois is marking International Red Panda Day with animal ambassador Leo at the three-acre Hamill Family Wild Encounters at 1:00 p.m.

A red panda is typically thirty-two-to-forty-six-inches long and weights twelve-to-twenty pounds. They are found in the eastern Himalayas (including India, Nepal, and Myanmar) and southwestern China. There are two recognized subspecies: the A.f. fulgens (western red panda) and A.f. refulgens (Styan’s panda). Brookfield Zoo has fulgens.

Credit: Brookfield Zoo Caption: Ian Edwards, Assistant Lead Craftsman at the Brookfield Zoo, explains how his workshop produced the artificial red panda tree for Hamill Family Wild Encounters.

About the Chicago Zoological Society and the Brookfield Zoo

General zoo admission is $21.95 for adults and $15.95 for children (ages three-to-eleven) and senior citizens (ages sixty-five-and-over). Toddlers and infants two-and-under are free. Parking is $14.

The Chicago Zoological Society is a private, non-profit organization that operates Brookfield Zoo on land owned by the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. Founded in 1920 and chartered in 1921, the Chicago Zoological Society (C.Z.S.) brought to life the vision of Edith Rockefeller McCormick (1872-1932) to give Chicago a zoo without bars modeled on the Tierpark Hagenbeck, known in English as the Hagenbeck Animal Park, a privately-owned zoo in Hamburg founded in 1907 by Carl Hagenback, Jr. (1844-1913). In December of 1919, Edith Rockefeller McCormick – the daughter of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and wife of Cyrus McCormick’s youngest son Harold Fowler McCormick (1872-1941) – donated eighty-three acres of land to the Forest Preserve District of Cook County to be the site of a modern zoo, to which the Forest Preserve District added ninety-eight acres.[1] Charles L. Hutchinson (1854-1924), the President of The Art Institute of Chicago, recruited Chicago Tribune editorial cartoonist and correspondent John T. McCutcheon (1870-1949) to become the first president of the C.Z.S. McCutcheon attributed this decision to the book In Africa he had written after he participated in the 1909 Carl Akeley (1864-1926) expedition for The Field Museum of Natural History.[2]

The Brookfield Zoo opened in 1934, during the second year of Chicago’s second World’s Fair, A Century of Progress International Exposition (1933-34). The zoo opened to the public on July 1, 1934. [3] The expectation had been that about 33,000 people would attend, but about 58,000 people turned out.[4] Accredited by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums, the Brookfield Zoo met the American Humane Association’s rigorous standards for the care and welfare of animals to become the world’s first zoo to receive Humane Certified™ certification.

Open every day of the year, the Brookfield Zoo is located between the Stevenson Expressway (I-55) and Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) and is also accessible via the TriState Tollway (I-294). The North Gate Main Entrance address is 8400 West 31^st Street, Brookfield, Illinois 60513. The South Gate Main Entrance address is 3300 Golf Road, Brookfield, Illinois 60513. A train station, the Hollywood (Zoo Stop) on Metra’s B.N.S.F. line, is a few blocks to the south of the South Gate entrance. The phone number is (708) 688-8000. The Website is www.czs.org/Brookfield-ZOO/Home.

$5.00 Per Month IN THE GARDEN CITY Subscription Plan)

$50.00 Per Year IN THE GARDEN CITY Subscription Plan

ENDNOTES

[1] Andrea Friederici Ross, Let the Lions Roar! The Evolution of Brookfield Zoo. Chicago: Chicago Zoological Society (1997), p. 2

[2] John T. McCutcheon, Drawn from Memory: The Autobiography of John T. McCutcheon. Indianapolis and New York City: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. (1950), p. 422

[3] Ross, p. 34

[4] Ross, p. 40

The Field Museum of Natural History in March, 2018

The Field Museum of Natural History’s entrance pavilions are at opposite ends of Stanley Field Hall, which has a north-south axis. The two porticos (porches) are each reached by two successive flights of stairs.

Both porticos of The Field Museum of Natural History are flanked by two small porches, which each have two caryatids (columns in the shape of maidens). On the facade, the wings are adorned with a colonnade of attached fluted Ionic columns. The building’s fluted Ionic columns have volutes (spiral-scroll-shaped crowns).

Each portico of The Field Museum is tetrastyle in antis with double-ranked fluted Ionic columns capped by volutes. An entablature crowned by a pediment rests atop the columns. The continuous frieze in each case is relatively plain. The wave-themed acroteria that crown the pediments are borrowed from the Palace of a Fine Arts, which housed The Field Museum until 1920 and now houses the Museum of Science and Industry.

The Field Museum of Natural History isn’t “just” a museum. Visitors can watch scientists at work through windows at the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice DNA Discovery Center’s Pritzker Laboratory.

Mrs. Charles (Laura) Schweppe, a daughter and co-heiress of John Graves Shedd, the former partner of Marshall Field I who succeeded him as president of Marshall Field & Company, and who, under the guidance of Stanley Field founded the Shedd Aquarium, donated an exhibit of 100 bronze sculptures by Malvina Hoffman to The Field Museum. They represent every race, nation, and tribe in the human family (more or less). On January 9, 1933, the first group, Unity of Man, went on display.

In addition to the four figures Henry Hering (1874-1949) made for the corners of Stanley Field Hall, he also made the twelve plaster round lion head shield escutcheons that line it. These are replicas of the marble round lion head shield escutcheon he made for the pediment of the facade of The Field Museum of Natural History.

Christmas at Chicago’s Union Station

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a POLAR EXPRESS display in the Great Hall of Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a closeup of the THE POLAR EXPRESS steam locomotive mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is the headlamp of THE POLAR EXPRESS steam locomotive mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This Union Station Company rail car loaded with super-size gifts is part of THE POLAR EXPRESS mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a Christmas tree in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This Christmas tree in the Great Hall of Union Station in downtown Chicago has emblems of Amtrak, Metra, and historic railroad companies whose routes they now operate like Burlington.

Cinemas sculptor Alfonso Iannelli (1888-1965) Helped Design

This is the Pickwick Theatre Building, an Art Deco movie palace and office building erected in downtown Park Ridge, Illinois in 1928.

The architects were Roscoe Harold Zook and William F. McCaughey. Sculptor Alfonso Iannelli, who also worked on the Adler Planetarium, contributed to this building.

In recent years, the Vlahakis family, who’ve owned the building for 50 years, have been able to turn the building into a multiplex by adding smaller theaters around the original auditorium. The latest one, with a screen four times the size of the one in the auditorium, will open in time to screen INFINITY WARS in May, if all goes well.

The Catlow Movie Theater is a cinema that opened in downtown Barrington, Illinois in 1927. The Tudor Revival style of architecture is not confined to the facade of the cinema. As with the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge, Illinois, sculptor Alfonso Iannelli (1888-1965) played a role in the design and decoration of The Catlow Movie Theater.