Bear Mountain & Harriman State Parks
Trailside: A Zoo Designed to Teach You to Leave the Zoo
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
Listen
Transcript
Trailside is an unusual zoo because its original educational idea was to make the landscape outside the cages more interesting.
The Trailside Museums and Zoo began in 1927 through collaboration between the Palisades Interstate Park Commission and the American Museum of Natural History.
Instead of concentrating everything inside one museum building, exhibits were arranged along a trail.
Geology.
Plants.
Native animals.
Local history.
Visitors were encouraged to learn by moving through the environment itself.
That model became influential in American park interpretation.
Today the wildlife collection focuses on native animals that cannot be released back into the wild.
That distinction matters.
This is not intended as a display of exotic species collected for spectacle.
The institution has evolved toward rehabilitation, education and regional ecology.
Four stone museum buildings interpret geology, reptiles and amphibians, natural history and human history.
The location also sits directly on the Appalachian Trail.
That creates a useful continuum.
A family may arrive for a short museum walk.
A thru-hiker may pass through on a journey stretching from Georgia to Maine.
Both use the same protected corridor at radically different scales.
For locals, Trailside can feel like a childhood institution.
Its historical significance is larger.
Early twentieth-century conservationists increasingly believed parks should not merely preserve scenic objects.
They should teach citizens how natural systems work.
Education was expected to create future conservation behavior.
There is a wonderfully self-defeating logic in that mission.
The better the museum does its job, the less time you should need to spend looking only at exhibits.
The goal is to step back onto the trail and notice rock, forest, birds and water with more informed eyes.
Trailside is a museum designed to return you to the park.