AA-2026-A062C5
On the image
Someone built this enclosure with a philosophy: give the bears a tub, some peeling paint, and a wall that suggests wilderness without going to the expense of providing any. Zoos of the 1960s ran on this kind of confident economy, betting that a stone-textured backdrop would satisfy both the animals and the paying public's idea of nature.
The two black bears crowd the same narrow lip of the pool, one climbing over the other in the businesslike way animals ignore personal space when water is the only thing worth wanting. The pool itself is more puddle than pond, greenish and thin, the kind of amenity a budget committee approved once and never revisited.
Nobody designing this space seems to have asked what a bear actually wants. They asked what a bear could be contained by, which in this era usually meant concrete, a drain, and a coat of paint that photographed better than it aged.
The historian's note
Municipal and travelling zoos of the 1960s commonly housed bears in small concrete-and-masonry enclosures fitted with a shallow bathing pool, a design standard largely unchanged since the early twentieth century. These enclosures prioritised visitor sightlines and ease of hosing down over any replication of natural habitat, reflecting animal-welfare standards of the period that predated later reforms in zoo design.
The species shown, likely an Asian black bear (Ursus thibetanus), was a common exhibit animal in mid-century zoological collections across Asia, Europe, and North America. Its pale muzzle marking, visible here, is a defining feature of the species.
Such enclosures, with painted rockwork walls and small pools, were phased out beginning in the 1970s and 1980s as zoo architecture shifted towards naturalistic, behaviour-enriched habitats, making surviving images of these older exhibits a documentary record of a since-abandoned standard of captive animal care.
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Two Asiatic Black Bears at a Concrete Bathing Pool, 1960s Zoo. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-A062C5. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-asiatic-black-bears-at-a-concrete-bathing-pool-1960s-zoo.
@misc{aaAA2026A062C5,
title = {Two Asiatic Black Bears at a Concrete Bathing Pool, 1960s Zoo},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-A062C5},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-asiatic-black-bears-at-a-concrete-bathing-pool-1960s-zoo}
}TY - ART TI - Two Asiatic Black Bears at a Concrete Bathing Pool, 1960s Zoo PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-A062C5 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-asiatic-black-bears-at-a-concrete-bathing-pool-1960s-zoo ER -
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