Minnesota Zoo: Facelift brings face time

"Oh-my-gosh-there's-one-right-THERE!" a woman cried out, flinching a bit when a grizzly bear materialized right beside her, her safety hanging by a three-quarter-inch wall of glass so clean it didn't seem to exist.

A few feet away, Mary Reed of Eden Prairie stood mesmerized as another furry giant swam past. "Don't you just want to touch 'em?" she asked a friend. "I want to touch that fuzzy little ear!"

The interaction, at one of a series of special previews, is just the sort of response the designers of the new $30 million addition to the Minnesota Zoo were hoping for.

"I liked it when the grizzlies pawed at the glass, like they wanted to get at you," said Andrew Nelson, age 12, of Eden Prairie.

Saturday's public unveiling of "Russia's Grizzly Coast" amounts to a re-launch of the 30-year-old zoo in Apple Valley, signaling a future closer to theme-park showmanship than the approach the zoo began with: drab concrete surrounded by a vast acreage stocked with sometimes hard-to-see animals.

After warring with legislators for decades, the zoo eight years ago imported as its new director a rising young landscape architect from the Bronx Zoo. Lee Ehmke's job: to touch the Apple Valley zoo -- a "sterile land of beige," in his own wry phrase -- with the same magic wand that brought him national acclaim in New York City.

To this new exhibit in Minnesota he has brought geysers, bubbling mud pots, dramatic vistas, and animals chosen for playful charisma. The exhibit is designed to look as though the bears could leap in amid the playful sea otters -- or even reach people, who cannot see the protective moat.

Heated dens and feeding zones draw animals to the edge of the human zone, creating soul-stirring moments of nose-to-nose contact. But it's meant to be more involving for the people as well: the sand pit the grizzly settles into to feast on his trout is a few feet away from the sand pit in which 5-year-olds pretend to dig up bones.

"We're all trying to blur the spaces between the animal and the human, so as to make deeper connections," said Glenn Young, vice president of zoological operations for Busch Gardens, Tampa Bay. In April, Busch opened a tiger exhibit that lets kids pop up into glass bubbles, eye to eye with the animal, and play tug-of-war with them to really feel their strength. "You want to tug peoples' heartstrings -- get them emotionally involved in the animal and its future in the wild."

As public zoos become more showman-like, he added, there has come to be "no real difference" between them and theme parks such as Busch.

Entertainment plus education

The exhibit, described by the Seattle-based consultants who helped create it as roughly three years in the making, drew on the talents of teams of artisans who cross back and forth between the realms of pure entertainment and education -- and who hand sculpted 55,000 square feet of rock face. It includes a log cabin painstakingly chiseled by artisans among the fishing villages and pine forests of the Russian republic of Karelia, then stripped apart, shipped, and reassembled here.

It represents a visit to Russia's eastern coast, both a vast wilderness full of surprises and one that is similar in climate to Minnesota, meaning animals suited to the seasons.

A week of pre-opening events, allowing VIPs and members an early peek, went smoothly but was mixed with reality. Guests pronounced one of the wild boars "mangy" and "scraggly," but one called the baby boars "cute." The amur leopard, in hiding, was all but impossible to see; guides explained it was shy and still adjusting to its new home. And the first few moms to have a peek at the new exhibit and its entry plaza resolved to bring changes of clothes for the kids next time, so inviting are the wet splash pads and the sand-filled Mammoth Dig site.

The hiccups, though, for almost everyone, were overridden by the surprise and oooohs and ahhhhs at the close-up encounters. Elegantly dressed VIPs squealed like 4-year-olds as huge lumbering grizzly bears swooped at live fish wriggling down a stream and then chased one another, fighting for possession of the prize.

"This is enthralling!" said Bob Kowalski, of the supermarket family. "Usually in zoos I'm Chevy Chase, going, 'Next!' But here I'm standing in place. You're this close. Any closer and you feel like you'd get eaten."

Phyllis Kahn, the veteran legislator and self-described "zoo fanatic" who was one of the most exasperated 1980s critics of the original zoo, pronounced this version "incredible."

"My husband and I travel a lot, and we sometimes sneer at Minnesotans' boasts of doing something 'world class,'" she said, standing beside the mesh separating her from the leopard. "But this is truly 'world class.'"

The exhibit is designed to be a first taste; officials hope it will inspire the outpouring of public and private financing needed to roll out its entire master plan, costing more than $100 million and transforming, over decades, far more than just the 3.5 acres the new exhibit has taken over.

"I hope that we will have hardhats out here indefinitely," Ehmke said.

David Peterson • 952-882-9023