From Our Past: City animal haven grew out of movies

[Jason]

City animal haven grew out of movies


Wednesday, January 27, 1999

Story last updated at 1:22 p.m. on Tuesday, January 26, 1999



Protesters greeted the circus recently complaining animals were exploited.

This is hardly new history.

That is why we have a zoo.

When Jacksonville was movie capital of the universe, surplus animals abounded on the local scene.

The city gladly offered to take them in and put them in a zoo.

Actually, put them in Springfield Park, which really was not a zoo but was as handy a place as any to keep stray wildlife.

Even before the movies Jacksonville long had been the winter wonderland for traveling animal shows, carnivals, circuses and medicine shows.

Extraneous and occasionally exotic wildlife often was left behind to perish or prosper in the local wild, or not so wild.

Legends persisted for years about the tiger that lurked near Springfield, the giant snakes that lived in Arlington, the odd traveling bear and mad baboon that occasionally turned up on the city streets.

An ostrich once collided with a car at Bay and Main streets. A tiger ate a hyena outside the Dyal-Upchurch building.

The Army disposed of a veritable herd of horses after the Spanish-American War and again after World War I.

The animal problem accelerated when the movies came to town.

Between 1910 and 1917 movie companies used Jacksonville and environs as the Wild West, Darkest Africa, the deserts of Araby, the capitals of Europe and anything else the script called for.

The movies used horses and cows and dogs and the occasional sheep, goat and camel. Alligators were no problem, as Jacksonville was an alligator-rich community. We had a bounty of reptiles. Ostriches, too.

But, amid the wealth of traveling animal life in Show Biz, Jacksonville was a tad light on animals it could call its own.

In January 1916 the city zoo in Springfield Park consisted of two deer, two wildcats, two coyotes, one black bear, five monkeys, five silver foxes, a whole lot of rabbits and some Guinea hens, cranes and squirrels.

Park superintendent Sidney G. Smith had just returned from Atlanta. There he purchased two zebras, a llama and a buffalo and began negotiations for a lion.

Smith returned from Atlanta at the same time W. Eugene Moore, veteran director of the Thanhouser studio, arrived in Jacksonville to begin making movies in Springfield.

Moore told the press many Los Angeles movie companies would follow him to Jacksonville, because Jacksonville flat out beat Los Angeles and the North for the making of movies.

It was the light, he said. Jacksonville had good light. Not too dark, not too bright. The movies and all their accouterment - casts of thousands, on heel and hoof - would come to Jacksonville because of the light.

And the light went on for park superintendent Smith.

''I understand several of the motion picture companies departing from Los Angeles have a number of wild animals that they use in pictures,'' Smith told The Florida Times-Union.

''I would be only too glad to be entrusted with their keep in the Springfield Park zoo . . . All that I would ask in return would be the privilege of keeping them in display cages. In this way I believe the city would secure a lot of valuable animals for the city and aid the motion picture companies at the same time.''

The inquisitive mind wonders at the result.

Did the motion picture companies indeed stock the zoo with lions and tigers, the howling coyote and dancing bear?

Do descendants of monkeys from the silver screen still swing from local branches?

Probably not.

It's not like in 1916 they were making ''Jurassic Park.''

Source: http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/012799/nef_allfoley.html