It now houses, among a variety of tropical and nocturnal birds, monkeys ranging from tiny frowning tamarins to larger and more aggressive baboons. Like the other brick and limestone animal buildings in the zoo, all of them designed by the architect Aymar Embery II, it bears a stone relief from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Robert Moses used the Works Progress Administration Funds to build this new zoo in 1935, which then held a bear pit, a lion house, a monkey house, and soon afterwards, elephants, housed in the dome-shaped Animal Lifestyles building. Judging by the fact that all the men are wearing hats, it must have been taken before the 1960s. Online I find an undated, tinted photographic postcard of that same pool, which originally held seals, surrounded by a crowd. The open-air sea lion pool has remained the focal point of the zoo’s central semi-circular fan-like layout. I have become fascinated with the ways in which this zoo, like so many others, has been remodeled over the century into what is now known as a children’s zoo. Perhaps seeing tiny humans gather around them again made them wonder if more food was coming. I read that sea lions often eat more when it gets colder, fortifying themselves with an increased fat intake and the resulting layers of blubber. These events-the multiple daily feedings, the attention-structured their time, as well as provided stimulation, and the sea lions most likely intuited a loss, when time changed and there was darkness and the human beings disappeared so early, a change that was winter but couldn’t be experienced according to the natural rhythms of such. It is possible they felt something was off, because of the disappearing winter crowds, and decreased public feedings, or because of the encroaching darkness during that time of day. Maybe she cannot match the plastic replica with the immensity of the actual animal. Although at two, she knows the word “sea lion,” having played with a plastic sea lion figurine in the bath, the same figurine she placed in a state of unusual solitude on my desk while I was working on this report, perhaps having heard me ask her father how he would describe the architectural layout of the zoo. My youngest, at their eye level in the stroller, kept referring to them as dogs. One of the sea lions swiftly retrieved and gobbled it up, then swam over close to us, almost to the railing, as though it were peering at us with inquisitive eyes set apart in a whiskered face. On one visit, the only other child who was there found a small inert fish on the pavement, and after a zoo worker gave permission, tossed it into the pool. Still, we would stick around, peering over the rails that so many children try to climb on top of, and probably have since the zoo was built almost a century ago, watching the creatures swim around and around, in that sleek, undulating way, the typical pattern for pinnipeds in captivity, though they can travel thousands of miles in the wild. The zoo’s website for the sea lion feeding hours had not been updated since March 2020, as if our ensuing isolation that began that month had frozen the schedule, and by the time we arrived, we were told feeding was just over for the day. Each time we visited that winter, we just missed the last feeding of the day, where zoo workers, usually women, feed their charges from buckets of fish, encouraging them to turn flips or clap large sleek flippers to their human hands, to the applause of the crowd. We entered the zoo from the Children’s Corner, which led us directly to the sea lion pool. Maybe we were curious to see how the animals were faring, this season, during the changing temperatures. We had nothing else to do after the toddler woke up from her nap and before the early winter darkness fell. My sister had gifted us a membership, and so our entry was free. The city, or at least our surrounding neighborhoods, appeared emptied out, possibly to extended family or island holidays. We returned to the zoo during the winter break.
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