In the summer of 1996, Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen and Nashville Zoo chairman Farzin Ferdowsi met for lunch at the Wild Boar restaurant. As it turned out, the midday meal may have been a turning point for a zoo in Nashville.
At the time, the zoo sat on a 135-acre site in Cheatham County near the community of Joelton. It was reportedly raising enough money through ticket sales and private donations to pay its operating costs, a notable achievement for any animal park. But Bredesen wanted the zoo to move to Nolensville Road in Davidson County, the site formerly occupied by the Grassmere Wildlife Park. Bredesen told Ferdowsi that he would be willing to lease the Grassmere property to the zoo for one dollar a year if it would move there.
A few weeks later, the zoo announced its relocation plans. “It seemed like a logical choice, because we felt like being in Nashville would help us build more community support,” Ferdowsi says.
During the next few years, things didn’t exactly go the way Ferdowsi and other zoo board members had hoped. To help fund the move, the Metro Council agreed to contribute $1.2 million to expand the parking lot, improve its Nolensville Road interchange, build a new sewer line and renovate the old Grassmere mansion on the property. But the city contributed nothing toward the actual conversion of the old Grassmere site to a new zoo, something zoo directors had hoped for. That process has cost more than $8 million so far, and virtually all the money has come from a handful of private donors.
Operationally, the zoo board chose to be open to the public at both locations during the transition period, which zoo director Rick Schwartz now admits was a mistake. “People were very confused about which facility was open,” he says. “Those who did come to the new site were disappointed because there wasn’t much to see yet, and because of the many construction projects that were going on. Let’s face it: People don’t come to the zoo to hear and see heavy machinery.” Because the zoo operated both facilities for three years, it hampered its fund-raising efforts and attendance.
But things look promising for the first time since Ferdowsi and Bredesen met in 1996. The zoo is adding a new exhibit about once a month; for the first time since it moved, the zoo has enough animals that the public is beginning to show interest. About 370,000 people are expected to visit the zoo this year, more than ever visited its Joelton location annually. The zoo has made major inroads on the fund-raising front and now counts among its largest donors members of the Frist and Ingram families, the Frist and Memorial foundations and even country music star Garth Brooks and his ex-wife Sandy.
And last week, Mayor Bill Purcell asked the Metro Council to contribute as much as $5 million this year for capital improvement projects at the zoo, money that must be matched dollar for dollar by private pledges.
Zoo supporters believe that the private and public money will help the organization move ahead with a $160 million master plan—a blueprint that calls for the zoo to cover the entire 183-acre Grassmere property and become one of the largest zoos in the Southeast. “We have lived hand to mouth every day for the last few years,” says zoo board member Robin Patton, who has contributed over $2.5 million to the zoo during the last two years. “As far as I’m concerned, if the mayor helps us, he’ll be our knight in shining armor.”
Filling a void
Considering the dearth of government support that the zoo has received during the past five years, perhaps its most impressive achievement is that it now has almost 7,000 individual and family memberships—one of the largest active mailing lists of any nonprofit organization in Nashville, thanks mostly to its family-friendly nature.
Ask parents, and they will tell you that children love the zoo. They love to see and hear exotic animals such as macaws and gibbons. They love to ride the elephants and to pet the donkey and the goats at Critter Encounters, the zoo’s petting area. Most of all, they love to play in the Jungle Gym, a large, shaded playground for kids as young as 6 months old.
When Schwartz was trying to recruit Robin Patton as a supporter, he arranged for her children to see and hold the tiger cubs. “They loved it,” says Patton, the daughter of Nashville billionaire Martha Ingram. Not only did Patton agree to serve on the zoo board, she has since bankrolled infrastructure improvements, construction of a new restaurant and half the cost of the building that now houses the elephants. “I can give you a hundred reasons that we need to support the zoo, not the least of which is that Opryland is gone,” Patton says. “Right now, the city of Nashville doesn’t have any tourist attractions that are really geared to children. The Country Music Hall of Fame doesn’t have much for children. But if you take a group of children out to the zoo, you will see right off the bat that children love it.”
The zoo’s success in reaching children and generating memberships is especially impressive given the size of its current facility. With only 16 major exhibits, the Nashville Zoo is still much smaller than zoos in comparable cities such as Memphis, New Orleans and Cincinnati. In fact, the zoo has fewer exhibits today than the old Nashville Zoo in Joelton had at its peak. “We know that some people are still disappointed by the size of the facility,” Schwartz says. “In some cases, we still haven’t found enough money to build exhibits for some of the animals that we had in Joelton. But there is also a difference between the zoo that we had in Joelton and the one that we are building here.
“I loved the Joelton facility, but it was a great B-rate zoo. What we are building here is a state-of-the-art facility, and we are building it one step at a time.”
To generate support and excitement with limited resources, zoo officials have focused on two things: attractions for children (the petting zoo and playground) and an unusual collection of exotic exhibits rather than a collection focusing on one type of animal or one geographic area. Since the spring, the zoo has added two gibbon exhibits and a group of hyacinth macaws, and it has renovated the Bengal tiger area. Next on the agenda are an exhibit of large African antelopes known as bongos and a collection of small African mammals called meerkats (a species made famous by Timon, a character from the Disney movie The Lion King). Schwartz is proud of these exhibits. Some of them, he says, “are as good as any you will find at any zoo in the country. We have also done a real good job when it comes to camouflaging infrastructure, which is a sign of a great zoo.”
The snake man
Like the evolution of the Nashville Zoo, Schwartz has an interesting story. He grew up in Raleigh, N.C., and counted some strange hobbies among his interests. When other kids were watching baseball games on television, he was watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. When other kids had dogs and cats, he had a pet cougar and a collection of reptiles. “My mother is still in therapy over the pet snakes,” he says. When other kids were playing high school football, Schwartz got an out-of-state job working at a professional dog kennel. “I left home the day after my 15th birthday,” he says. Schwartz later became involved in zoos when he owned a business that sold food for zoo animals.
Today, he is an expert on every aspect of zoo operations, from the amount it costs to feed each elephant ($8,000 per year) to the price of the structure in which the elephants are housed ($1.05 million). What makes zoos expensive to operate, he says, is not the cost of feeding animals, but housing them. “Most of the animals we have go in at night, not just to protect them from the weather, but to make sure that they and the public are safe in case something happens—like a tornado knocks down a fence in the middle of the night. So in order to have elephants, you have to have a big, strong building with heated floors and hydraulic doors. In order to have giraffes, you have to have a tall building.”
Schwartz worked closely with an architectural firm to develop the long-term master plan for the zoo. That master plan envisions almost 100 major exhibits, organized by geographic areas such as Africa, South America and Madagascar. It would cover the entire Grassmere property, making it one of the largest zoos by acreage in the United States. It also would contain an amphitheater and group events area, plus a high-tech indoor/outdoor educational exhibit called Nature Works (toward which Garth and Sandy Brooks had already donated $1 million).
The master plan projects annual attendance to rise to 600,000 by 2006 and 850,000 by 2010. “We have become the number one paid attraction in Nashville, with only $7 million or $8 million of private money,” says zoo chairman Jim Hunt. “Just think what we could do with the kind of local government support that the mayor is talking about.”
Hunt is also hoping that the zoo will become the future home of the Red Grooms Tennessee Foxtrot Carousel, which the Purcell Administration wants to move from its Riverfront Park site. “Our master plan already has a place for a carousel, although the one it calls for would depict endangered species,” he says. “If we could get the [Grooms] carousel instead, that would be a wonderful addition to our playground area and would save us the cost of building a carousel.”
The master plan, however, is dependent upon the city of Nashville helping out. And in that regard, zoo supporters are up against Nashville history.
A fairly new idea
A number of medium-sized cities in the South and Midwest have historically had strong animal parks, but Nashville is not one of them. Over the years, Nashville had privately run animal displays that have been remembered fondly, such as the small animal exhibit in Glendale Park developed by Nashville banker and venture capitalist James E. Caldwell in the early 20th century. But until the last decade or so, Nashville had no zoo to speak of. “Many cities Nashville’s size have had zoos for so long that they are historic,” says Jane Ballentine, director of public affairs for the American Zoo and Aquarium Association. “It is fairly unusual for a city the size of Nashville to have not had a zoo for most of its history.”
Part of the problem is that zoos don’t make money. The purpose of a zoo is not to produce profits, but to give people a place to learn a thing or two about the animals with which they share the planet. Zoos are usually built with a combination of public money and private donations. If run properly, ticket revenues, concessions, memberships and some level of endowment can cover the ongoing cost of feeding and housing the animals, paying the staff and maintaining the grounds. But the money needed to build exhibits in the first place usually has to come from other sources.
For most zoos, this initial investment comes from a combination of large private donations and ongoing government support. “If zoos had to make ends meet with no government money of any kind, it would cost so much to go to the zoo that most families wouldn’t be able to go,” Ballentine says. Among the many examples of government support: The city of Memphis contributes $1.2 million annually (plus free water and facility maintenance) toward the Memphis Zoo, and the government of Louisville gives $1.8 million a year to its zoo.
The Nashville Zoo is also waging a war of misunderstanding. Its own history is often confused with that of a now defunct animal park that used to be located on the Grassmere property. In 1964, sisters Margaret and Elise Croft agreed to deed their family’s 300-acre farm on Nolensville Road to the Nashville Children’s Museum, with the idea that it would be preserved as an active farm (and in exchange for the museum paying the property taxes on it for as long as they lived). The park became the property of the Cumberland Science Museum, successor to the Nashville Children’s Museum, in the 1980s.
The museum sold about a third of the land to developer Bobby Mathews for the development of the Grassmere Office Park. It then used the money from that sale, along with private contributions and state and Metro grants, to build an interactive nature center that focused on animals indigenous to Tennessee. The Grassmere Wildlife Park opened in 1991.
Grassmere had a loyal and active membership list and offered thousands of Nashville school kids a unique learning experience. But the park closed after about four years because of cash flow problems. Charles Howell, the president of the Cumberland Science Museum from 1989 to 1992, says there were several reasons Grassmere didn’t survive. “For the first few months, it was an exciting place, and there was a lot going on,” he says. “But the whole strategy of Grassmere didn’t really work. There is a limit to how excited kids will get to see indigenous animals that they might already be seeing in their backyards or in the countryside.”
Howell is one of many people with keen memories of Grassmere’s failure. “The bottom line is that the park was a money pit, and zoos are money pits,” he says.
Others familiar with Grassmere’s history say it was a mistake for the museum to build a wildlife park there. “The original intention of the sisters was to keep it as a working farm, to make it so that kids could see what it was like to live in the 19th century and to keep the focus on the house,” Mathews says. “A working farm requires a lot less capital and upkeep than a wildlife park.”
Ironically, the Grassmere Wildlife Park also suffered because of competition from the Nashville Zoo, an organization with a completely different story. In the late 1980s, Fred Ferdowsi, who owns a series of retail stores in Nashville and Brentwood, bought a farm near Joelton. A few years later, he sold it to area residents Mike Stewart and Kevin Antle, who began building a zoo on the site. Stewart and Antle ran out of money fast, and they soon turned to Fred’s brother Farzin. Farzin fell in love with the idea, effectively took it over and reportedly invested about $5 million in the zoo by the time it opened its doors to the public in 1991. By that time, Schwartz had been recruited as zoo director.
The man behind the plan
Today, more and more Nashvillians know Farzin Ferdowsi’s name. But it hasn’t been that long since he redefined the definition of “outsider” in Nashville’s business and social circles. Ferdowsi is a native of Tehran, Iran. When he was 18 years old, he came to the United States to attend the University of Kansas as an engineering major. Rather than returning home after college, he stayed and became the manager of a Pizza Hut. That job led to an ownership position.
Today, Ferdowsi owns 82 Taco Bells in the Southeast, plus several Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants. At a time when many Americans are irrationally suspicious of people of Middle Eastern descent, Ferdowsi is proud to be here and quite aware of the dark side of extremist religious factions. In 1981, his father was killed by forces allied with the Ayatollah Khomeini, probably because of his status as a leader in the Baha’i faith. “They wanted him to recant his faith, and he wouldn’t do it,” Ferdowsi says.
Today, Ferdowsi says he invested so much money to build a zoo because he has a “passion for animals” and because he thought it was a shame that Nashville didn’t have one. “I’ve seen zoos all over the world, and there is no reason why Nashville shouldn’t have one of its own,” he says.
Schwartz says there was a third reason. “Keep in mind that while we were building the zoo, Grassmere was under construction, and there was a third group called Zoo Boosters trying to build yet another zoo in Davidson County,” he says. “There were so many people in town who said that Farzin couldn’t do it and that his zoo wouldn’t work. I think he did it in part because everyone said it would fail. But make no mistake about it: If it weren’t for Farzin, we wouldn’t have a zoo today.”
The amount of money Ferdowsi loaned the zoo is an unresolved legal question. “I feel like I was very generous when the zoo started, and I have already forgiven the interest on the debt two times,” he says. However, the status of the debt is clouded by the fact that Ferdowsi loaned money to the zoo while he was its chairman.
Currently, the board is trying to negotiate a settlement. If the negotiations between Ferdowsi and the zoo break down, he can claim the Joelton property, since that’s the only collateral the zoo used when it borrowed money from him in the 1990s. Several board members are adamant, however, that none of the money that Nashville’s taxpayers would theoretically contribute to the zoo should be used to repay Ferdowsi. “The terms of the grant that the city would make—and these are very clear—are that the money can only be used for new exhibits and capital improvements,” says Metro Finance Director David Manning.
Beyond expectations
Despite predictions that the Nashville Zoo would do poorly at its Joelton site, it actually performed fairly well. The zoo had many of the attributes that people have come to expect from zoos—exotic animals such as lions, tigers, elephants and giraffes, wonderful landscaping and even a fascinating house of reptiles. Attendance rose each year until it surpassed 300,000 in 1997—a heftier number than attendance figures reported by other attractions such as the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Cumberland Science Museum. By the time Bredesen made his pitch to move the zoo to Grassmere, however, Ferdowsi was agreeable. “We did OK in Joelton, but it was very hard to get a lot of community support from Nashville, not to mention corporate sponsorships, as long as we were in Cheatham County,” Ferdowsi says.
“There are a lot of zoos that succeed and get a lot of support from the community even though they aren’t actually in the city, such as the zoo near Columbus, Ohio,” he adds. “But we didn’t get much support from Nashville when we were in Joelton.”
By the time he met with Bredesen, Ferdowsi had also brought more people onto the zoo’s board, turning it from one he largely controlled to one with many independent thinkers and prominent citizens. Among those were Larry Papel, managing partner of the Nashville office of the law firm Baker Donelson Bearman & Caldwell, and Nashville banker Jimmy Webb. Jim Hunt, the owner of a business called Benefit Communications Inc., became the zoo’s chairman in 1998. Ferdowsi remains on the board.
These days, Hunt gets high praise from fellow board members for his ability to raise private money for the zoo and to generate support within the Purcell administration. “Jim and the other members of the executive committee have done a remarkable job,” Papel says. “Not only has he been great at generating enthusiasm for the zoo, the zoo also has far better accounting and financial controls in place.”
One of Hunt’s biggest achievements may have been recruiting the involvement of HCA chairman Tommy Frist. During the last two years, Frist has personally donated money to the zoo and helped direct Frist Foundation funds to the zoo. He also personally lobbied Metro Finance Director David Manning, once a top HCA executive, on behalf of the zoo. “A first-class zoo is the mark of a first-class city,” Frist says.
Now that Purcell and Manning have proposed their capital improvements budget, which includes funding for the zoo, the only remaining question is whether the Metro Council will buy the idea of a taxpayer-supported zoo. At-large Metro Council member Chris Ferrell believes it will. “This is a worthwhile investment for us as a community,” he says. “The last council took a step in the right direction by moving the zoo to the Grassmere property, and it’s time for this council to take an even bigger step. A better zoo would be an excellent amenity to Nashville’s families, not to mention a tourist draw at a time when we could use it.”
But not everyone is so boosterish. “My initial reaction is that the zoo is a private enterprise, and it ought to support itself,” says Inglewood council member Lawrence Hart, who, admittedly, tends to be against most every mayoral initiative. “Once we start putting public money into it, where will it stop? I also have a lot of senior citizens who are upset about how much their property taxes have gone up, and some of them are opposed to that money going to the zoo.”
Several other council members say they are still undecided whether to support the zoo grant or not. They include Bettye Balthrop of Goodlettsville and Ginger Hausser, who represents the Belmont/ Hillsboro area. “There are a lot of things about this capital improvements budget that I have questions about, and the zoo is definitely one of them,” Hausser says.
The staff and board at the Nashville Zoo, meanwhile, are optimistic. If the council passes the mayor’s proposal, the zoo will begin one of the most ambitious fund-raising drives in Nashville history (outside of Vanderbilt University). First on the agenda will be getting the $5 million endowment for Metro matching funds. “We have a lot of rich and generous people we need to call on,” Hunt says.
As for Schwartz, he’s standing by with plans of his own. As soon as the bongos and meerkats move in, he has immediate plans for 10 more exhibits, which will add leopards, ocelots, storks, flamingos, hornbills and guenons to the zoo’s population. After that, he will turn his attention to building several structures, most notably a new animal commissary, necessary to secure accreditation from the American Zoo and Aquarium Association. Then and only then will he focus on what he calls the zoo’s first “world-class exhibit,” a large indoor and outdoor facility that will duplicate the Brazilian wetlands habitat known as the Pantanal. “When it comes to the world of zoos, we are the new kids on the block,” he says. “It takes time to build. But I think we are on our way.”
