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1978–1981
Lead: The zoo's modern era begins with the voters. A 2017 magazine account of the zoo records that around fifteen years after the capuchin birth of 1963, the citizens of South Bend passed a vote that helped fund further development at the Potawatomi Zoo; the Parks Department's chronology gives the result its date and price: "1979 — First Major Zoo renovation in 52 years at Potawatomi Zoo. Cost is $1.5 million." Fifty-two years reaches back to the ten-acre expansion of 1927 — the chronology's own arithmetic confirms that nothing the city counted as major had been done at the zoo in between, through the whole middle of the century. The renovation renewed a fifty-two-year-old plant, and two years later the zoo changed its economics: in 1981 the Potawatomi Zoo began charging admission, which the Tribune's later history of the zoo gives two purposes — an accurate count of attendance, and revenue. The attendance series the zoo publishes today, told whole further down this account, is the descendant of that 1981 decision: before the gate charged, the zoo could estimate its crowds; after it, the zoo could count them, and counting is what made the modern attendance record — and the case for every later investment — possible.
Sources:
- South Bend Parks & Recreation Department, chronological history (the 1979 renovation, $1.5 million, the first major renovation in 52 years).
- "One Tank Trips," The Columbian, August–September 2017 (the citizens' vote funding zoo development).
- South Bend Tribune, "A Look Back: Indiana's oldest zoo," 28 September 2015 (admission first charged in 1981, for an accurate count and revenue).