Bronx Park, the Garden and the Zoo

Near Belmont, where Richard Joseph Spinelli’s company Sandhills Real Estate has bought and remade houses and apartments since 2022, lies Bronx Park, the city property that holds both the New York Botanical Garden and the Bronx Zoo. The park exists because the city bought its land in 1888 and 1889 and then handed large parts of it to two private scientific societies, one for plants and one for animals.¹ The sections below take that history one grant at a time, from the first colonial purchase to the later additions, and note where the records give different dates.

The namesake purchase

Bronx Park, like the borough and the river that crosses it, is named for Jonas Bronck, a sea captain born in Sweden who trained in navigation in Amsterdam. According to the Parks Department, Bronck settled the area in 1639, bought about 500 acres from the Dutch West India Company, and traded tools, clothing and utensils with local Native Americans for more land.¹ The Bronck farm hosted a peace conference with the Weckquaesgeek in 1642. The land then passed through several families over the next two centuries before any of it became public ground.

The parks movement and the 1884 act

The push for Bronx parkland came from a citywide campaign in the 1880s. In 1881 John Mullaly, a former newspaper reporter and editor, formed the New York Park Association with other citizens worried about unchecked urban growth. Their lobbying helped pass the New Parks Act of 1884, which paid for acquiring large undeveloped tracts for parks and parkways.¹ Writing about this tract in 1887, Mullaly said it would be hard to do justice to its loveliness without seeming to exaggerate.²

The city purchase of 1888 and 1889

Between December 1888 and January 1889 the city acquired 640 acres for Bronx Park.¹ It was one of several purchases. By 1890 the city also held the lands that became Van Cortlandt, Pelham Bay, Crotona and Claremont parks, along with four parkways. The WCS archive describes the same wave as six new Bronx parks bought by the late 1880s, Bronx Park among them.²

The Lorillard ground

Much of the northern part of the park had been a country estate. The WCS archive says the 250 acre site later chosen for the garden once belonged to the tobacco merchant Pierre Lorillard.² The family’s stone snuff mill and other remnants of that ownership still stand inside the garden, and the Parks Department describes the Lorillards as the last private owners of the area.¹ The Lorillard story on the Belmont side of the estate is told in the entry on Belmont.

The botanical grant of 1891

The first large grant went to plants. Nathaniel and Elizabeth Britton, botanists inspired by a visit to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, joined other members of the Torrey Botanical Club in pressing for a comparable garden in New York.² On April 18, 1891 the state legislature set the land aside for a public botanic garden,² and the Parks Department records that 250 acres were allotted to the botanical society that year.¹ The garden still gives 1891 as its founding year and 250 acres as its size.⁴

Designing the garden

The garden opened in 1896 with Nathaniel Lord Britton as its first director, according to the Cultural Landscape Foundation. Calvert Vaux and Samuel Parsons Jr. drew the first design, a pattern of curving drives that showed off the Bronx River and the hemlock forest. John Brinley’s general plan of 1900 guided the next stage of growth, and the Olmsted Brothers produced a master plan in 1923 that revisited circulation and upkeep.³ Parks notes a 40 acre stand of old growth forest, one of the last such tracts in the city.¹

The zoological grant, 1897 or 1898

The second grant went to animals, and here the two institutional histories give different years. In 1896 the newly formed New York Zoological Society was looking for a site, and its chosen director, William T. Hornaday, settled on the southern part of the park after about an hour there. The WCS archive states that the city allotted 250 acres south of the garden to the society in 1897.² The Parks Department history dates the same 250 acre allotment to 1898.¹ Neither source explains the gap, so both years are given here, each with its source.

Opening day, 1899

The zoo opened to the public on November 8, 1899. The WCS archive says the first collection held 843 animals of 157 species.² Counts for the present day differ from source to source. Parks calls the zoo the largest urban zoo in the United States and cites more than 8,000 animals of more than 800 species.¹ The zoo’s own page lists over 11,000 animals, calls the zoo the flagship park of the Wildlife Conservation Society, and dates the first modern zoo animal hospital, with a full time veterinary staff, to 1916.⁵ It also gives the grounds as 265 acres, more than the original grant.⁵

The 1906 addition and the park’s monuments

The city added 66 acres at the southeastern end of the park in 1906, land that now holds Ranaqua, the Bronx headquarters of the Parks Department.¹ Monuments followed. Paul Manship’s Rainey Memorial Gate, dedicated in 1934 at the Fordham Road entrance to the zoo, carries 22 full sized sculpted animals on a tree of life design. Within the zoo, the Rocking Stone, a granite block about seven feet high left by the Ice Age, rests balanced on a granite base overlooking the Buffalo Range.¹ A 2009 Norwood News report described how the zoo and the botanical garden joined Fordham University and Montefiore Medical Center in an alliance of the borough’s four largest institutions, with plans to turn Fordham Road into a tree lined parkway.⁶

Landmark status and the park today

The botanical garden was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1967 and is also on the National Register of Historic Places.³ The garden describes itself as a museum of living plants arranged across its landmark site.⁴ Parks lists Bronx Park today at 718.37 acres, spread across four community boards, numbered 6, 7, 11 and 12, with playgrounds, bike paths and ball fields beyond the two institutions.¹ The Board 6 portion is described in the entry on Bronx Community District 6, the borough in the entry on the Bronx, and the building ages of the surrounding city under prewar buildings. The company itself appears on the Sandhills page. A 2016 City Limits essay described a restoration of the Bronx River Forest in the northern section of the park by the Natural Areas Conservancy, the Bronx River Alliance and NYC Parks, removing invasive plants and adding native species.⁷ NBC New York reported in August 2026 that a camera overseen by the Wildlife Conservation Society had photographed a river otter in the Bronx River, the first documented in that stretch in about a century.⁸