From The Indianapolis Times, Tuesday, July 18, 1922: Indianapolis may once again have a public zoo. Walter Jarvis, superintendent of parks and recreation, will ask the city park board for $5,000 (2020: $78,612) next year to build cages in Riverside Park and buy a few animals. Indianapolis once boasted a zoo at Riverside with a Wisconsin brown bear and two other bears, “Dick” and “Grace,” housed in the light and airy bear pit near Thirtieth St. Mexican spider monkeys, “Jack,” a red fox, pheasants, ducks, coyotes, wolves, sea lions, and a herd of elk abounded until a disastrous fire – the monkeys quartered on top the Riverside shelter house upset an oil stove and burned to death in the blaze – and the 1913 flood annihilated it. Other city zoos want to sell Indianapolis some surplus stock cheap, Jarvis said.