(LEFT): POLAR BEARS ARRIVED AT THE ZOO FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 1937 | RIGHT): TWO TRAINS OF COASTER CARS DESCEND A HILL OF THE RACER ROLLERCOASTER IN 1926

Trolleys were once so emblematic of Pittsburgh that Fred Rogers used one as a logo for his children’s show. Though they and he both exist now chiefly in our memories, trolleys deserve credit for two of the most beloved places still enlivening our neighborhood: Kennywood in West Mifflin and the Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium in Highland Park.

Both family attractions celebrate their 125th anniversary this year. On the occasion of these two auspicious quasquicentennials, we look into the past for their 1898 origins — though as it turns out, both got their start even further back.

PARK VISITORS FROM SWISSVALE EXIT A GMC “OLD LOOK” BUS ON THE TROLLEY TRACKS AS THEY ARRIVE AT KENNYWOOD. (CA. 1944-45)

Daytrippers began coming to Kenny’s Grove, a scenic picnic ground on the bluff overlooking the Monongahela River, after the Civil War. They boarded boats that docked at Kenny’s Landing or rode trains along the riverbank to Kenny Station, all named after a prosperous family that mined coal from the hillside. The hill, however, was a hindrance, since picnickers had to surmount its steep slope after disembarking.

That changed when Andrew Mellon got into the streetcar business. The industrialist and banker’s Monongahela Street Railway, built to serve Homestead, Duquesne and McKeesport, bridged the river at Braddock and ascended southeast along the ridge, skirting the picnic ground.

In those days, transit companies commonly put parks along their lines to attract more fares, especially on weekends. Mellon’s father had done just that, founding a campground called Idlewild on the route of his railroad linking Ligonier to Latrobe. With the advent of electric streetcars in the 1890s, currents for the cars did double duty, also supplying the power for park lights, rides and amusements. In December 1898, the Monongahela Street Railway acquired the grove from the Kennys and immediately announced plans to begin construction on a new park the following summer: Kennywood.

THE AUTO RACE, LATER KNOWN AS AUTO RIDE. (CA. 1920-1930)

In its first season, Kennywood featured a dance pavilion, a rowboat lagoon and a carousel to complement its shady groves, strolling paths and sports field. Those were soon augmented with the park’s first Ferris wheel and roller coaster (a relatively tame affair called the Figure Eight Toboggan, with four-person cars and a top speed most people could outrun), the Old Mill (the park’s oldest surviving ride) and a two-story restaurant and event venue called the casino, still serving food today as the Parkside Cafe.

The casino wasn’t for gambling; an older sense of the term also connoted resort buildings meant for a variety of entertainments. Indeed, Pittsburghers had since 1895 frequented a casino in Schenley Park that featured an indoor ice skating rink, a rare wonder of the age. (The feature ironically proved to be that casino’s ruination, when an ammonia leak from the ice-making machinery caused a fire after only a year of operation.)

THE MINIATURE AIRPLANE RIDE IN KIDDIELAND. (CA. 1940-1950)

But the new city park, named for heiress and land donor Mary Schenley, still boasted a bevy of exciting attractions in 1898. At the main entrance stood Andrew Carnegie’s great library, art gallery and music hall. Crossing over the new Panther Hollow Bridge, parkgoers could admire exotic blooms, including some transplanted from the 1893 Chicago world’s fair, in the elaborate glasshouse paid for by Carnegie’s business partner, Henry Phipps.

Schenley Park even had the city’s first zoo. The menagerie held monkeys, bears, lions, exotic birds, chameleons, foxes, elk and an elephant, Gusky (named after a local department store). Enclosures were somewhat slapdash, so in 1895 Edward Bigelow, the city parks director, announced plans to erect permanent zoo buildings.

MEMBERS OF A CHOIR FILL THE BANDSTAND FOR A PERFORMANCE. (CA. 1920-1930)

Politics at Play

The plan didn’t suit Bigelow’s cousin, Chris Magee. The Republican party boss, elected city treasurer at the age of 25, had built a powerful political machine while making a fortune in a field that offered advantages to men with connections in city hall: streetcars.

Magee had big plans for his network of trolleys — then widely known as traction railroads, since pre-electric versions moved by gripping onto underground cables, as San Francisco’s still do today. He intended to consolidate several East End routes while opening a line to the city’s other recently unveiled public green space, Highland Park. So Magee sent a note to Mayor Bernard McKenna on Dec. 24,1895, offering the city a sizable Christmas present in cash if it would relocate the animals from Schenley Park.

The multitiered headline on the front page of the next day’s Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette summed up Magee’s proposal succinctly: “Gift of a New Zoo — Traction Magnates Want Monkey Cages at Highland Park — Ready to Put Up the Cash — Attractions Needed to Make Street Car Traffic — Something to Amuse the People.”

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Mayor McKenna obliged, signing a sweetheart bundle of ordinances favoring Magee’s traction interests a few months later. In fact, he waited until the day he left office and notified reporters of this final executive act on his way out the door, declining further comment.

Critics labeled it a “street grab.” It had all the markings of a typical Magee machine backroom deal — the sort that journalist Lincoln Steffens would single out in a 1903 exposé of Pittsburgh municipal corruption that became a chapter in his muckraking classic, “The Shame of the Cities.” But as Steffens readily conceded, Magee was immensely popular, widely hailed for his generosity. That was evident at the June 1898 dedication of the Highland Park Zoo, where the party boss and his streetcar cronies smiled from the reviewing stand as an estimated 10,000 Pittsburghers filed in, many having made the journey on Magee’s own trolleys.

THE AIR SHIPS WERE DESIGNED BY HARRY G. TRAVER OF TRAVER ENGINEERING COMPANY IN BEAVER FALLS. (CA. 1910)

Three times as many people flocked to Kennywood on its opening day in 1899. Attendance soared as the park expanded. Andrew McSwigan, head of publicity for the streetcar line, banded together with two other businessmen to lease the park from his former employer in 1906. McSwigan became a significant figure in the industry, founding the National Association of Amusement Parks in 1920 and serving as president for its first four years.

Frederick Ingersoll, who designed Kennywood’s venerable Old Mill and several of its earliest roller coasters, saw such demand that he launched a construction company in town to manufacture rides for venues across the country. He also built Luna Park, a short-lived rival venue in Oakland that is the inspiration for today’s “Lost Kennywood.”

A trio of coasters built in the 1920s — the Jack Rabbit, Racer, and Pippin (now the Thunderbolt) — continue to thrill riders to this day. To maintain the century-old attractions, carpenters each winter replace about 10% of the tracks and frame with a tractor-trailer load of Douglas fir and Georgia pine, according to Mark Pauls, Kennywood’s general manager since 2020.

“What I’ve learned since I’ve come to Pittsburgh is that Pittsburghers think of this as their park, and it’s generational. Sometimes you see up to four generations visiting the park together,” he says.

J. WHITLEY CAVITT EXAMINES THE BURROWS HE DESIGNED FOR THE UNDERGROUND ZOO. THE LARGEST AND MOST POPULAR EXHIBIT IN THE CAVE WAS AN 18X10 FOOT BEAVER DAM AND LODGE. (1965)

Nostalgia and Novelty

As one of only two amusement parks designated as National Historic Landmarks, Kennywood must find the balance between nostalgia and novelty — what to refurbish and what to replace. Its latest feature for 2023 is Spinvasion, an aerial whirligig that is the first of its kind in United States. The intergalactic multi-action spin ride will blast off as the centerpiece of the new Area 412 in the spring.

The 125th anniversary will be a momentous one for the zoo, too. In 2015, in a dispute over safety policies for elephant handling — a fraught issue for Pittsburgh after one of its pachyderms fatally crushed a handler in 2002 — the zoo broke from the Association of Zoos & Aquariums, a national oversight body, and lost its accreditation. Besides blocking access to various grants and animal breeding programs, the forfeiture has thrown a monkey wrench into the zoo’s lease with the city. The lease, which expired in 2022, requires AZA accreditation to be renewed.

The Zoological Society of Pittsburgh, the nonprofit that oversees the zoo, hired the current president, Dr. Jeremy Goodman, in 2021 with the understanding that he would prioritize regaining the accreditation. An ongoing process of upgrades and inspections to that end has been underway since Goodman’s arrival, and formal application will be made this spring, with a decision expected later this year.

BELMAR KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN VISIT A SOUTH AMERICAN LLAMA DURING THE “DAY AT THE ZOO” ENRICHMENT PROGRAM. (1969)

Until then, the zoo is holding off on any major additions, working instead on master and strategic plans. It recently surveyed 9,000 guests, asking which animals they would like to join the cast of critters. Goodman admits to being surprised at the most popular request, since he says it is not particularly exotic, not by zookeeper standards anyway.

“The people of Pittsburgh … miss the big brown bears that we used to have here. I’ve heard that loud and clear,” he says.

ENTRANCE TO THE ZOOLOGICAL GARDEN ON HIGHLAND PARK DRIVE. (CA. 1900)

Ursines charmed generations of zoo visitors, rambling in great stone dens built during the Great Depression. But the bear exhibit closed more than a decade ago; one of the enclosures now houses a concession stand called “The Beer Den.” Though not ready to discuss details, Goodman strongly hints that brown bears may be making a comeback in the near future.

“Zoos are really about fond memories as a kid,” he says. “And if there was a celebrity animal, the star of the zoo, that’s what people kind of remember and hold dear in their hearts, and what they want their children to see as well.”

IN 1949, PITTSBURGH’S FIRST CHILDREN’S ZOO OPENED FOLLOWING THE RECEIPT OF A GRANT FROM THE SARAH MELLON SCAIFE FOUNDATION. SCHOOLCHILDREN VISIT WITH A TAPIR. (CA. 1950S)

That strikes a chord with Donna Hudson, a retired BNY Mellon executive recently reelected to a second two-year term as chair of the zoological society. Hudson fondly recalls wheeling her toddler in a stroller to see the animals; that same daughter interned at the zoo in college while majoring in marine biology and is now a keeper working with bears and big cats at the Palm Beach Zoo.

“At that age, she had an interest, and what the zoo did for us was it encouraged it and let her interest grow,” Hudson says. “The Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium is absolutely what gave her the impetus to pursue a [science] career, and now she is choosing to educate the next generation. She’s talking to kids every day about animals in the wild.”

It’s an educational mission the institution aims to sustain — with any luck, for another 125 years.

Mark Houser is a public speaker and the author of “MultiStories: 55 Antique Skyscrapers & the Business Tycoons Who Built Them.” A frequent contributor to Pittsburgh Magazine, he also writes about classic Art Deco and other landmark structures for HighrisesCollection.com, an online art and history project.

PHOTO SOURCES   Kennywood: Kennywood Park Records, 1895-2018, MSS 141, Detre Library and Archives, Senator John Heinz History Center.  PITTSBURGH Zoo & AQUARIUM: Underground Zoo and Tapir: Allegheny Conference on Community Development (Pittsburgh, Pa.), Photographs, 1892-1981, MSP 285, Library and Archives Division, Senator John Heinz History Center. Belmar Kindergarten: Pittsburgh Public Schools photographs, 1880-1982, MSP 117, Detre Library and Archives, Senator John Heinz History Center. Zoological Garden Drive: General Print Collection, Detre Library and Archives, Senator John Heinz History Center. Special thanks to Margaret E. Hewitt, Manager of Reference Services at Senator John Heinz History Center.