Weird Island

37. ANIMAL ESCAPE: Rhoda the Sea Lion

Episode Summary

Could a rumor that a sea lion escaped Roger Williams Zoo and made it all the way to the bay possibly be true? To Visit: Roger Williams Zoo | 1000 Elmwood Ave, Providence, RI 02907

Episode Notes

Could a rumor that a sea lion escaped Roger Williams Zoo and made it all the way to the bay possibly be true? 

To Visit: Roger Williams Zoo | 1000 Elmwood Ave, Providence, RI 02907

Episode Source Material: 

Roger Williams History

• Roger Williams Park - Wikipedia
• Horace Cleveland
• Rhode Island Providence 1T<.TT.7:::: Roger Williams Park Historic District See Description #7 Providence Tiernan #2 Rhode Isl
• History of American urban squirrel
• Temple To Music

Sea Lions

• Sea Lions Return to RWP!
• The Sea Lions
• When the Sea Lion Escaped From Providence's Roger Williams Zoo
• Our History | Roger Williams Park Zoo
• Dancing And Dining With Betsey And Rhoda
• Newport Mercury | September 27, 1946

Zoo History

• History of Zoos in Parks
• Zoo Was First—New York or Philly? – Zoo Walks Through History
• Carl Hagenbeck
• Investigating the Development of the Modern-Day Zoo
• Carl Hagenbeck: The inventor of the modern animal park
• The Hagenbeck Legacy
• EVOLUTION OF THE ZOO

Episode Transcription

• There are some Rhode Island topics that are very nostalgic for people. Topics like Rocky Point, or the various Rhode Island Carousels (both of which I’ll be featuring in future episodes). And then there are the zoos. I am at Slater Park in Pawtucket all the time because my dog loves the dog park there. She actually just bolted up off the couch and ran over because she heard me say park. Whoops! But Slater Park used to have a small zoo that closed in the 1990s, and people who visited the zoo as children have fond memories and remember specific animals they loved there. A favorite is Fanny the elephant, who lived in Slater for 35 years. People were crying when she was rehomed in 1993. 
• And then, of course, there’s the Roger Williams Park Zoo. And I had a listener, Keith, reach out with an interesting story idea. I’m going to read you Keith’s whole message. He wrote, 
• If looking for any extra ideas, a history of Roger Williams Park and Zoo might dig up some fun stories. I believe the zoo is the 3rd oldest in the country (?) and I've previously read how the animals were originally spread out within the park and not just in one concentrated zoo area. During this period there were sea lions held in the area of the park not far from the carousel and the Japanese gardens - you may be familiar with the man made pond with a seemingly random concrete structure in the middle (which was actually there for the sea lions to haul out to sun themselves on). Apparently a sea lion once managed to escape, swimming its way through the network of lakes in the park and eventually made its way into the Pawtuxet River and swam into the bay through Pawtuxet Village. No idea if true, but I've always loved the story and the idea of a non-native sea lion living out the rest of its time on the Rhode Island coast! 
• I loved the idea of this story, too! But I hadn’t heard it before, so I was skeptical. It sounded like an exaggeration. Maybe a sea lion escaped, but could it possibly have made it all the way into the bay? 
• I’m Sara, and you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week, I’ll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up from my tiny, little state of Rhode Island. And this week, we’ll dive into the history of Roger Williams Park and Zoo and dig through the newspaper archives to find out if the urban legend of the sea lion who escaped into the bay is true. 
• So, first things first. Let me tell you a little bit about Roger Williams Park. The park originally consisted of about 100 acres of land that was left to the city of Providence in 1871 by Betsy Williams in memory of her great, great, great grandfather Roger Williams. The land had been the family farm, and the only building on the property when it was turned over to the city was the house where Betsy and her sister Rhoda had been born and lived for most of their lives. You can still see that building, which was originally built in 1773, and the graves of Betsy and much of the Williams family are in a small cemetery in the park.  
• This gift to the city came at a time when there was a growing concern over the crowded conditions in American cities, and there was a movement towards conservation and appreciation of nature. Not just for the sake of preserving nature itself, but also for the health and wellness of people living in cities. 
• Other cities lead the charge in the widespread movement for better parks. Central Park in NY began to be developed in the 1850s and Philadelphia was investing in parks around the same time. But Providence lagged far behind. In 1887, the Public Park Association of Providence estimated there was 1 acre of park land for every 1,000 people, while other New England cities like Boston or the major cities in CT had closer to 1 acre for every 200 people. 
• So, the need was there for a park that could be enjoyed by the people of Providence. But this land specifically, well, the city was actually kind of reluctant to accept the gift. It was about three miles away from the center of Providence, and wasn’t the most accessible. And only a portion had been cultivated. Some areas were pretty swampy. But, regardless, the city started to develop it into the first area created specifically as a park. Today, it’s still the largest and most popular park in Providence. 
• A landscape architect named Horace Cleveland was brought on to design Roger Williams Park, and he believed that the natural features of the land should be preserved and elevated, rather than replacing those features with elaborate, artificial ornamentation. You can get a sense of this philosophy if you drive or bike through. The roads wind around because they were adapted to the irregular shape and contours of the land. Cleveland intended each turn to “open a series of pretty vistas.” And where the park was swampiest, areas were partially drained and excavated to form lakes, for a total of seven lakes spread throughout. 
• In the late 1890s, the park increased in size, from about 100 acres to roughly 400 acres, and buildings started to be constructed, including the Stable and Menagerie, the Park Museum, the Dalrymple Boathouse, and the Casino--all built between 1891 and 1896. By 1901, the city funded a bandstand where people could enjoy free concerts. This bandstand would later be replaced with another around 1915. And then in 1924, the Temple to Music was designed, which is probably the most iconic structure in the park with its classical design and natural amphitheatre. The first performance at the dedication of the temple drew a crowd of 50K people. 
• When it came to those crowds of people, many arrived by streetcar, which enabled people from all parts of the city and all incomes to reach the park. Open air concerts have always been one of the park’s most popular forms of entertainment, but there were all kinds of activities over the years. There were model sailboat regattas, field days, the first public fly casting pool in New England, pitching courts for horseshoes, 30 public tennis courts, a pony track, 150 rowboats for rent, sledding and ice skating, including the First Annual Rhode Island Speed Skating Championships which was held in the park. And then, of course, there were the animals. 
• Roger Williams is considered the country’s third oldest zoo. As early as 1872, a collection of small animals and birds was brought to the park. The collection included raccoons, guinea pigs, white mice, squirrels, rabbits, hawks, peacocks and anteaters. And, aside from the anteaters, this sounds like a pretty boring grouping of animals, but at the time, these animals might have been kind of exciting to see. Even squirrels, the menace of cities and parks today. Because by the mid 1800s, humans had pretty much eradicated squirrels in cities. It was actually the park movement and the intentional reintroduction of squirrels that brought them back, with releases beginning in about 1870 - just as this collection of animals was brought to Providence. 
• By 1900, the park exhibited 47 different types of birds and animals, including an elephant named Baby Roger, who was apparently purchased by the donated pennies of local school children. Like Keith alluded to in the beginning of the episode, the animals were actually displayed throughout the park. 
• Prior to 1900, zoos were generally called menageries, and they generally consisted of exotic animals in small cages side by side. But at the turn of the century, with that new appreciation of nature developing, a German man named Carl Hagenbeck revolutionized the approach to caging animals, and created what was essentially the modern zoo, which featured animal enclosures without bars that more closely matched the natural habitats animals would be found in. Hagenbeck was the most well-known wild animal dealer at the time. He famously supplied many European zoos and sold animals to P.T. Barnum in the US. He displayed animals in major international expositions, and in these expositions he pioneered the idea of using moats to enclose and separate animals and the public. Hagenbeck’s zoo in Germany was really the first modern zoo, and it began this movement to take cages out of the zoo experience. 
• Before I jump back to Roger Williams Zoo, and how the animals were spread throughout the park, I do have to mention that while Hagenbeck is seen as having revolutionized the zoo experience, he also displayed humans in his zoos, and I’ll go totally off the rails if I get into that, but you can google human zoos yourself and go down that rabbit hole. 
• So, anyway, this leaves us with this more natural approach to animals displayed in parks that would later become the modern American zoos. Central park in New York, which is probably the first zoo in America, began with a bear club tied to a tree in 1859. And then grew as it received unwanted pets and abandoned circus animals. Roger Williams Park was more intentionally planned, with animals located throughout the park in a natural way.
• There were deer and sheep roaming and grazing the park. There were bison and bears housed on the hill across from the Dalrymple Boathouse. There was a monkey island surrounded by a moat. And then there were the sea lions. The Seal House opened in June of 1938, and it’s confusing because it’s called the Seal House, but it was actually sea lions on display. The pond where they lived is surrounded by a stone wall and a low fence, but it’s right out in the open and it was probably pretty cool to see sea lions swimming about almost as if they just lived naturally in the pond within the park. 
• And on a Tuesday afternoon in September of 1946, visitors in the park got to see an even more convincingly natural sight, when a 2-year-old, 150 pound sea lion named Rhoda (who was probably named after Betsey Williams’ sister) hauled herself up onto the stone wall around the seal house pond, then flopped her way over the three foot fence and took off the explore some of the other lakes in the park. 
• I mean, who could blame her? Horace Cleveland did a nice job with the landscape architecture, and those other, bigger lakes probably looked pretty appealing. Rhoda went from one lake to another, relaxing for a time in each before moving on. Then she “flipped overland” until she made it into a small stream, which she followed all the way to Pawtuxet cove. Newspaper articles noted that by the time she reached the cove, Rhoda had drawn quite a crowd. Several hundred people lined the bridge and there was such a commotion that it halted traffic in the area. Two men in boats tried to capture her and bring her back to the park. They would slowly head towards her, but just as they drew near, she would dive underwater and appear 100 or so yards away, always with a fresh eel in her mouth. She eluded her captors and entertained the crowd for some time before diving down one last time. She never popped back up. The article suspected she had disappeared in the direction of the Narragansett Bay. 
• Rhoda enjoyed an awesome day, put on one heck of a last show, and then took off into the sunset to enjoy her freedom. No one knows what happened to Rhoda after that, but sea lions really aren’t native to the area. Rhoda had come from the Pacific Ocean, not the Atlantic, so one can only hope that she did okay out there on her own. 
• Eventually, around 1965, the animals located throughout the park were moved to a newly fenced-in compound which became the Roger Williams Zoo of today. But you can still see the Seal House in the park, though you’ll probably only find ducks swimming in the water. In 2019, statues of sea lions were added to commemorate the real ones that once lived there, and Rhoda even gets a shoutout on the sign. 
• Zoos are nostalgic for a lot of people. It can be incredible to see exotic animals you’d never run into in real life for the first time. But zoos can also be really controversial. This idea of keeping animals in cages, no matter how nice those cages are designed to be, makes a lot of people increasingly uncomfortable. So, when you hear a story like Rhoda’s, it can feel like a real triumph. She heroically escaped her captors and took off into the sunset! I even found a Reddit thread where someone asked, “How is this not a Disney movie already?” and another person said, “Hello, Pixar!” and suggested that in the Pixar version Rhoda would form a friendship with a dog who would help her navigate the streets of Providence. Some suggested titles included “Unsealed,” “A Seal called Rhonda,” - because the internet has mistakenly read her name as Rhonda - and “The Sealshank Redemption,” 
• So, this urban legend turned out to be true! And for that, it gets my Weird Island “seal” of approval. Are we done with the bad puns and dad jokes? I think we’re done. Thanks for the fun story, Keith! And thank you all for listening! I’ll see you next week as we dig up more stories about all things weird and wonderful in the little state of Rhode Island! Until next time!