Photo By Matt Borgerding

Cincinnati Zoo President Gregg Hudson (right) and Steve Foltz, head of groundskeeping and landscaping, meet with Clifton neighbors to discuss plans for the zoo's new parking lot (background).

The tension had palpably defused by the time the president of Cincinnati Zoo, Gregg Hudson, stood peering into the muddy basin in Gayle Linkletter's backyard.

The June 20 encounter seemed fated to be contentious when Cincinnati Zoo officials agreed to meet with Clifton residents who for the past five years have faced a mound of dirt that's to be the zoo's new parking lot.

About 30 people met at the intersection of Cloister Drive and Marmet Court beneath what had once been an idyllic wooded area with a stream and walking paths -- until 1999, when the zoo began replacing the greenery with fill dirt.

"And so one day the bulldozers just show up and started pushing down trees," according to Tim Quinlivan, who watched in horror from his home on Bishop Avenue. "There was never any notice or public discussion whatsoever."

Then the dirt came in, tons and tons of it. Quinlivan estimates that the mound he now sees from his house is about three stories higher than the wooded ravine that used to run through the property.

A humbler zoo?
It was just another blow to the neighborhood from the zoo, which about a decade ago seemed poised to displace low-income residents in Avondale. But in 1997 voters rejected a tax levy to pay for a new parking garage.

The zoo found itself not only having to scale back expansion plans but also scrambling to reverse negative perceptions about how it spends public funds. In 1998 and in 2004 voters approved tax levies for the zoo, fiscal and administrative changes having restored public trust.

But to date that hasn't done anything for the residents who live next to the future parking lot. In addition to losing their beautiful view to piles of dirt, they've listened to the rumble and beeps of trucks and endured silty runoff from the site into their yards and basements.

Hudson reassured them that the lot will be finished by this year's Festival of Lights, an annual Christmas celebration at the zoo.

Residents asked what the parking lot will look like and what trees will be planted in how wide a buffer between their sight lines and a sea of reflective windshields.

To answer those questions, Hudson brought along Steve Foltz, the zoo's director of horticulture.

"My feeling is to really make this parking lot a part of the collection, not just a green buffer," he said, rattling off a long list of possible vegetation and inviting residents to come see the prospective trees themselves.

Residents describe a zoo administration that for years brushed their concerns aside, pawning them off on lower-level administrators.

"I would describe their attitude as one of grudging tolerance," Quinlivan says.

But this zoo administration has now earned residents' grudging respect and trust. For three hours June 20, neighbors stood in their streets and talked with Hudson and other zoo officials, representatives from the civil engineering firm that designed the lot and the contractor charged with construction, community liaisons and a board member from Cincinnati Parks, which actually owns some of the land that's to act as the buffer.

In a major concession to residents, Hudson agreed to scrap plans to build an overflow exit from the parking lot onto Cloister Drive.

Recent re-grading of the site should help with water runoff, but the zoo has already begun helping neighbors try to figure out the exact source of their sewer overflow problems by running exploratory lines down the old pipes.

Some of the problems might belong to the Metropolitan Sewer District, not the zoo, according to a representative from Turner Construction.

"There's a lot of things that's occurred in the last five years, and is it all coincidence or cause-and-effect?" said Mike Elovitz, a neighborhood resident who is a scientist with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

A new dialogue
Linkletter's house sits at the bottom of Marmet Court. When she first bought it in 1997, she couldn't believe she'd found such a refuge in the middle of Clifton.

"I never thought I could find something so remote and so accessible," she says.

That's forever gone, but the zoo helpfully ran a line down her troubled sewers the previous Friday.

"This is just the zoo trying to be a good neighbor," Hudson said.

"I feel that the zoo has been responsive to me," Linkletter said.

"In the past, the zoo got a bad reputation," Elovitz says. He wonders now if the behavior that earned it that reputation was an institutional fault or a problem of certain individuals.

"Can you get a new zoo president and expect things to be different?" he says.

Dee Graham, a resident and one of the meeting's principal organizers, offers a cautious yes.

"I thought that Gregg Hudson was a model of accessibility at Monday night's meeting," she says. "Many areas of concern were addressed and perhaps even put to rest, though a number of questions and concerns remain."

Kathy Schwab, whom Hudson hired to secure funding to finish the parking lot and act as a community liaison, is also hopeful.

When Hudson took over in 2001, he told Schwab the first priority was figuring out that parking lot. He also hired another community liaison, who has since taken over the zoo's human resources.

"He's very community-minded," Schwab says. "I don't know if it's a new trend with institutions."

Photo By Matt Borgerding

The zoo hired Kathy Schwab to secure funds for the parking lot, which the zoo's new president called his top priority -- four years ago.

Not everyone is convinced the zoo has shed its old skin. Quinlivan is still concerned that the zoo won't disclose its funding for the buffer-zone horticulture.

Elovitz, a zealous foe of large parking lots, wonders if the green that was colored into black-and-white conceptual drawings indicated plantings or porous pavers, which, while more environmentally friendly, aren't much prettier than pavement.

"Despite the zoo's reiterating their desire to be a good neighbor, it has only been recently, after five years of complaining, that the zoo officials have come out of their cages to hear us roar," Aliette Sastre says.

During the three-hour meeting Hudson meticulously went over plans for lighting, fencing, tree planters, reprogrammed traffic patterns and future development possibilities.

Sastre made procuring aadmission passes for the zoo's inconvenienced neighbors her particular mission.

"Is that all it'll take?" Hudson said. "Give me a list of names."

Then he set a stack of his business cards on the table.

Zoo officials and residents closed the meeting at the Cactus Pear restaurant.

"We all ordered beers," Schwab says. "We felt we needed them." ©