Zoo aiming to raise $125 million

Looking to fund major building projects and to bolster its small endowment fund to ensure it can continue free admission, Lincoln Park Zoo on Tuesday kicked off a five-year, $125 million fundraising drive.

Dubbed “My Kind of Zoo,” the capital campaign ranks as one of the largest fundraising efforts for a cultural institution in the city’s history, and as one of the biggest launched by a U.S. zoo. Donors lined up before Tuesday’s launch already have committed $81 million.

“More people visit this zoo each year than visit Yellowstone National Park,” Mayor Richard M. Daley said at a morning news conference about the campaign. “It is one of our major tourist attractions.”

The zoo already has announced three of the building projects that the campaign will finance. Those include the $18 million reconstruction of its large mammal house into the Regenstein African Journey, opening next year; a new $25 million great ape house and Ape Institute on the site of its present ape facility, opening in 2004; and a $6 million renovation of the Farm-in-the-Zoo, reopening late this summer.

On Tuesday, zoo officials also announced they will rebuild the Pritzker Children’s Zoo facility for a 2004 opening, though plans and a cost estimate still are incomplete. In addition, $35 million would go to the zoo’s endowment fund, now at $12 million.

The new campaign easily tops the zoo’s previous big effort, which raised $55 million from 1992 to 1997 to renovate lion and tiger habitats and the sea lion pool, build the Regenstein Small Mammal-Reptile House and the Gateway Pavilion visitor center, and rebuild the old reptile building into the zoo’s first restaurant.

Once the current round of construction is finished, zoo director Kevin Bell said it will mark the end of a long cycle of modernizing that the zoo began three decades ago under his predecessor, Lester Fisher.

“This is my 26th year working at the zoo,” Bell said, “and I remember maybe only six or eight months when we didn’t have a major construction project somewhere in the park.”

The $35 million that zoo officials hope to add to the endowment, Bell said, will help assure that entry to Lincoln Park Zoo will remain free. The National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and the St. Louis Zoo are the only other major zoos in the United States that charge no admission.

The drive was boosted with a pledge of $19 million from the Regenstein Foundation, a longtime financial benefactor. All 65 members of the zoo’s board of directors have pledged to the drive, as have its women’s board and auxiliary board, said Jay Proops, campaign co-chairman.

Coming in a period of economic downturn, the zoo’s campaign is ambitious even when compared with the economic boom times of the 1990s.

In that decade, cultural organizations in Chicago collectively raised more than $1 billion, but none by itself sought as much as $125 million. A week ago, a consortium of museums asked the state for $400 million over the next 10 years, but that would benefit hundreds of museums throughout the state.