Plan to Revitalize L.A. Zoo Includes New Ape Forest : Parks: Officials hope it is one of half a dozen expansive exhibits. But a daunting fund-raising job lies ahead.

Imagine a solitary path through dense jungle. A canopy of branches and leaves nearly blots out the sun. Giant ferns and exotic orchids rise from the damp earth into fog so thick it condenses and rolls off the skin. A parrot screeches. Then the trail opens into a clearing and, suddenly, you are not alone.

A family of orangutans caper along a fallen tree. Farther on, a half-dozen silver back gorillas stare down at their visitors from a grassy ridge. High atop the hill in a stand of palms, a chimpanzee is fashioning a branch into a lunchtime skewer.

In the jungles of Borneo or West Africa this scene might pass unrecorded day after day, for ages. But hard against the Golden State Freeway, at the Los Angeles Zoo, it could create quite a sensation.

That is the hope of the zoo’s operators, who are prepared to bet at least $14.5 million that the African Great Ape Forest can help propel the outdated facility into the 21st Century.

The zoo’s operators recently approved a five-year plan that would make the ape forest the first of half a dozen expansive new exhibits--verdant natural habitats that would blur the barriers between animals and humans. Preliminary plans are being drawn, and a daunting fund-raising goal has been set, to push the 28-year-old zoo into a movement of animal parks and aquariums worldwide that promise to balance visitor enjoyment with the goals of animal welfare, scientific research and species conservation.

“There is no reason the Los Angeles Zoo should not be one of the great zoos of the world,” said Ed Maruska, executive director of the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden. “It has a very good collection, a great location with 200 acres that a lot of zoos would kill for and a good botanical collection.”

Years of political inattention, deferred maintenance and bickering between management and employees have left the zoo rooted in its past--unable even to spend the bulk of $25 million from a 1992 property tax measure approved by voters for park projects countywide.

The latest catalyst for change came in February when Maruska and two other leading zoo directors issued an “action plan” for reform. Already, zoo Director Mark Goldstein has stepped down. A City Council committee authorized $8.5 million for maintenance over 18 months--six times what normally would be spent during that period. And a plan to ship out as many as 69 lone or poorly kept animals, representing 17 species, has been completed.

These actions address some of the zoo’s immediate problems and are designed to help the facility pass an accreditation inspection by the American Zoo and Aquarium Assn. this spring.

But to sustain momentum, zoo managers, Mayor Richard Riordan and City Council President John Ferraro agree that they must press ahead with big new attractions--animal exhibits that will capture the public’s imagination and help jump-start sagging corporate donations and attendance, which has dropped 25% in five years. The plans have received approval from the city’s Recreation and Parks Commission.

For inspiration, the zoo’s operators need only look around the nation, where zoos are creating charisma and crowd appeal in unlikely ways. In Cincinnati, Insect World has wowed the public and increased attendance 12% in a year with such marquee players as the inch-long, poisonous bullet ant. In Toledo, the Hippoquarium offers a novel sub-surface view of the world’s most incongruous amphibians, part of an African savanna that spurred a 22% jump at the gate and a near doubling of zoo memberships.

In New Orleans, the opening of a new exhibit virtually every year--from the six-acre Louisiana Swamp more than a decade ago through Butterfly Pavilion last month--helped turn the Audubon Zoo from one of the nation’s worst to one of its best. And Zoo Atlanta established itself as a top zoo, and a potential model for Los Angeles, with a rain forest gorilla habitat that is acclaimed as state of the art.

Where those exhibits might once have existed in a vacuum, they are now always tied to lessons about the environment or to direct support of conservation. Schoolchildren working with the Ft. Wayne, Ind., zoo have created a fund to preserve primate habitats in Indonesia. And zoos have become centers for new technology. The Bronx Zoo developed a satellite telemetry device that is being used to help protect elephants by tracking their movements in thickly forested Central Africa.

Zoos also have become a refuge of last resort for endangered species. Captive breeding programs have been credited with reintroducing several species to the wild, including the Los Angeles Zoo’s propagation of the California condor and the continuing effort to establish the nearly extinct bird in a remote section of Santa Barbara County.

The California condor project has been one of the most acclaimed breeding programs in the country. But in a sad irony, the success has not been transformed into popular appeal because the birds must be kept isolated from humans in order to prepare for a successful release into the wild. Nearly 40 of the majestic red-eyed creatures are relegated to a dozen giant chain-link cages near the rear of the zoo.

But the continuing growth of the captive population has persuaded federal wildlife officials that at least some of the birds can be put on public display. The condor could become a point of opportunity for Los Angeles, one where the issues of education, species preservation and crowd appeal could all converge.

Now, the creature’s keepers are dreaming of a spectacular aviary and are scrounging for donations to build it. One plan would exhibit the birds on a chaparral-covered hillside, above a stream, along with other species such as kit fox and mule deer. An ambitious enhancement might include giant fans to re-create the updrafts in which the condors like to spread their 10-foot wings and soar.

First on the zoo’s fix list, though, are the great apes, beginning with a new home for more than a dozen chimpanzees.

The highly social troop has been relegated for years to a barren enclosure that has become one of the zoo’s principal embarrassments. When it was opened in 1966, the concrete faux-rock setting seemed a marked improvement from the cages of the past. But now biologists remark on how inhospitable and hot the exhibit is for animals that are accustomed to grass and trees.

In preliminary sketches for the African Great Ape Forest, the new chimp area would be doubled in size. Concrete surfaces would be replaced with grass, wood chips and foliage. Palm trees for climbing would ring the back of the exhibit and provide chimps chances for climbing that are now absent.

In keeping with the modern zoo trend, the exhibit would also tell a story--about the importance of protecting forest lands that are the chimps habitat. Alongside the ersatz forest would be a re-creation of an abandoned logging site, complete with fallen trees where the chimps can play.

“It’s about how the chimps are coming back in and reclaiming the rain forest after it has been borrowed by man,” said Jon Coe, of the architectural firm that is designing the $5.2-million exhibit.

Plans for the exhibit are scheduled to be finalized soon, with the blessing of acclaimed naturalist Jane Goodall. She is also urging the zoo to resume its dormant participation in Chimpanzoo, a program she helped design to provide stimulation by making chimps “work” for their food.

“Animals would be best off free in the best possible world,” said Goodall, who was visiting Los Angeles recently. “But the best possible world is gone in so many places. We can’t put them back, so we better look after them as best we can.”

At Zoo Atlanta, the new rain forest setting that rotates gorillas between adjacent enclosures is credited with bringing stimulation to apes such as Katoomba. The reticent female once refused to venture far from a concrete slab by her night quarters, but now ranges widely across her exhibit.

The forest is generally credited as the catalyst that helped remake that facility from one of the nation’s worst into one of the best. Terry Maple, director of the zoo, said Los Angeles’ rain forest can be even better because of new technology that can hide moats and walls in shrubbery, create man-made humidity with dozens of misting devices and broadcast jungle sounds through computer-controlled sound systems.

“This Great Ape Forest in Los Angeles will be the first thing that (the) San Diego (Zoo) will look at and say, ‘That’s better than we have,’ ” said Maple, one of the three zoo directors advising Los Angeles. “It’s got to say--’We’re going to compete with the best zoos in the world.’ ”

Such ambitious plans require ambitious budgets. The greatest challenge for the zoo will be finding the minimum of $50 million that it will take to build the exhibits. The first $23 million is expected to come from a 1992 tax measure that charges the average homeowner $12 per parcel over 22 years to benefit park programs countywide. The rest of the money will have to come from vastly increased fund raising by the zoo’s private support group, the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Assn.

One of the zoo’s advisers said GLAZA officials are “choking” on that ambitious target. In the last 2 1/2 years, the organization has given the zoo $3 million for projects. “It’s enormous,” GLAZA President and CEO Susan F. Rice said of the goal. “I would be the first to say that, today, I couldn’t commit to raising that.”

The three zoo directors urge a more competitive bent. Noting that the San Diego Zoo raises money in Los Angeles “with impunity,” they call on GLAZA to become “a high-achieving, visible and effective fund-raising organization.”

Other zoos have found their most compelling fund raisers within their own gates and Los Angeles might have a rainmaker of its own in a gorilla named Caesar. The 17-year-old Western lowland gorilla was born at the zoo and became a favorite to a generation of schoolchildren, many of whom return now to marvel at the size of the ape they once knew as “Baby Caesar.”

Caesar, though, has led a solitary existence for the last three years since his female companions were shipped to other zoos for breeding. His vegetation-poor habitat, with a log fort, resembles a Boy Scout campground more than a wild forest. But the ape’s lonely vigil of today could become grist for the public relations campaign of tomorrow.

“Los Angeles has to develop a kind of emotion and loyalty and spirit around its zoo the way other zoos have,” Maple said. “In a way, maybe Caesar will become part of that. That is a very important story for Los Angeles to tell.”