Brookfield Zoo Chicago

What it was first at

The zoo was laid out with moats and ditches instead of cages, which was close to unheard of in 1934 and drew attention from zoos around the world. The approach is now so standard that it takes an effort to see it as an innovation, but this is where a good deal of it was worked out.

It was also the first zoo in the United States to show giant pandas, and the first in the country to build a fully indoor dolphin habitat, in 1960.

What is no longer there

• The pandas. Su-Lin arrived in the 1930s and was the first giant panda shown in America. Accounts that describe the panda exhibit as a continuing attraction are something like eighty years out of date. Su-Lin was taxidermied after death and is at the Field Museum, which is the only place in Chicago she can now be seen.
• The elephants. The last one left in September 2010 and the zoo stopped keeping them, after sustained criticism over the deaths of several African elephants. The Pachyderm House no longer holds elephants, although the zoo's long-term plan anticipates their eventual return. Anyone bringing a child specifically to see elephants should know that before setting out.

What is new

• The Bramsen Tropical Forests opened on 11 July 2025, adding nearly three acres of outdoor habitat to the indoor rainforest building of 1984. It was built with the help of an anonymous donation of forty million dollars in 2023, the largest the zoo has received, and it houses gorillas, orangutans and monkeys, with a gorilla conservation centre that can be seen into from the public side.
• Seven Seas, the dolphin habitat, has reopened after a refurbishment that kept it shut for more than a year. The dolphins are bottlenose.

The zoo is part-way through a long programme of rebuilding, so some areas are closed at any given time and the zoo's own site is the place to check before travelling out.

Binti Jua

In August 1996 a three-year-old boy climbed the barrier at the gorilla enclosure and fell some eighteen feet onto the concrete below. Binti Jua, a western lowland gorilla with her own infant on her back, picked him up, carried him across the enclosure and set him down where keepers could reach him.

The story went around the world, and it is still the thing the zoo is best known for outside Chicago. It is worth adding that she had been trained to bring her own baby to keepers for inspection, which is very likely what she was doing.

Ziggy

The grimmer story, and one worth keeping rather than tidying away. Ziggy was a bull Asian elephant who attacked his keeper in 1941 and was then kept chained inside the Pachyderm House for close to thirty years. He was eventually given access to an outdoor yard late in his life. The exhibit standards the zoo is now known for were arrived at partly by having done things of that kind first.

What to expect now

Several thousand animals across some five hundred species — considerably more than older figures suggest — on grounds that take a full day to walk properly. Among the long-standing draws are the pygmy hippos, the meerkats, the Australian species house, the reptile house and the baboons on their island.

Individual animals and species come and go, so lists of them age badly. The habitats are what the visit is built around.

Getting there

Metra's line from Union Station stops at Hollywood, which is at the zoo's gate, and Pace buses serve it. By road it is about half an hour from downtown without traffic, and rather longer with it — older accounts that promise twenty minutes by taxi are optimistic. It is a half-day trip at the least and a full one if the whole site is walked. General practicalities for the city are on the Chicago page.