"Uncle Charlie" Invents the Forest Gump Bench
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The Central Park Sea Lion ("Seal" Pool as it was known, though there are now real harbor seals at the zoo.) Pool as we know it now was designed by city park architect Charles Schmieder, who also designed the original Chrystie-Forsythe park bench shown in the Forrest Gump film. Although the zoo started in 1861 as the Menagerie, the Central Park Zoo as we know it now was designed and built in 1934. Due to his work on New York City playgrounds and pools, Charles Schmieder was known as "Uncle Charlie" the "Architect for the Children."
The reason for the zoo rebuild was the need for jobs during the Great Depression. The money for the project came from Federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) funding meant to provide money to the unemployed. Since the purpose was to provide money to poor unemployed workers, there was very little money for materials, so the architects had to be creative with limited materials. Another limitation was the architects had only sixteen days to design the entire zoo! Aymar Embury chose Charles Schmieder, known as the architect for the children due to his lead in designing playgrounds, to design the sea lion pool amongst other zoo features and exhibits.
Charles Schmieder did something revolutionary for architects; he studied the habits of sea lions from a book. If you look at zoo cages before 1934, they had few details that served the animals. Naturistic cages already existed, such as in Germany's Hagenbeck Zoo, but these were more decorative than functional to the animal's needs. In other words, serving the needs of humans, not the animals. For example, the transparent windows are meant for the people, not the animals. The Hagenbeck Zoo goal of natural surroundings was for the people to know what far off places where the animals lived were like. Instead, what Schmieder did was revolutionary: he put the priority on the animal, not the people. Before Schmieder the entire emphasis on a zoo cage was the display of the animal. "Uncle Charlie" had had sixteen days to complete his designs due to the priority of providing work to the unemployed. So, the priority was not even the display; the zoo construction was just a pretext to prove welfare money. In his short time, Uncle Charlie found time to first research the habits of sea lions at a library. He learned that Sea Lions sometimes like to hide and be in private, so he included a place for the sea lions to hide. This was incredible because he designed an anti-display of an animal. The design was for the animal, not the people, for the first time in history.
Another design aspect of the sea lion pool was the concrete blocks to simulate the rocks Sea Lions like to climb on. The reason the cement blocks did not look like real rocks was for two reasons. The first, due to the WPA money the zoo had to be built quickly and took only eight months with workers working at night. The other reason is Charles learned that sea lions prefer flat rocks over bumpy rocks. Notice all those naturalistic sea lion pools you see have more uneven rocks than flat? Since the sea lions like flat rocks, he made sure they were flat-topped, thus serving the needs of the animals over a fake natural esthetic.
The update of the cage/enclosure went backwards in 1988. Charlie had the pool surrounded by a ledge the sea lions could lie on because sea lions are territorial and fight for beach space. The needed space was replaced by glass so the people could see the sea lions swim, which was not good for the sea lions because the 1988 designers put the crowds over the welfare of the animals. Take a look at the 1988 redesign, it has no raised flat spaces, and the flat space is small so it crowds the sea lions which causes stress on the beasts. Animals have little need for how something looks.
The zoo reopened on December 2, 1934, with the honorary zookeeper former Governor Alfred E. Smith presiding over the ceremony. Aymar Embury selected Uncle Charlie as the main architect because the zoo would be a "picture-book zoo" for children, so it would be appropriate that the architect for the children would do the most legwork on the project. What made Charles Schmieder a great architect was that he went out of his way to find what the animals and children really wanted, two groups that architects before him did not bother to take into account what they really wanted or needed because they did not have a voice.
Due to Charlie being the playground designer for New York City, as well as the designer of Union Square, amongst others, his designs were widely copied by parks departments in smaller cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.