Big Cat Tracks: The Master Plan's Final Phase

Ground broken 14 August 2025; under construction through 2026

Lead: On 14 August 2025 the zoo broke ground on Big Cat Tracks, the final phase of the 2016 master plan: $5.5 million of new, naturalistic habitats for Amur leopards and Amur tigers and other Eurasian species — the leopards coming home from the WPA's Cat House of the Depression years to a complex built for them in the zoo's second century. The zoo's magazine called the groundbreaking "the Zoo's first physical expansion in decades," a phrase that measures how completely the master-plan decade had until then rebuilt within the old fences: entry, giraffes, lions, bears, and lodge were all renovations of ground the zoo already held, and Big Cat Tracks pushed the boundary itself. Construction continued through the summer of 2026, as the Tribune's season coverage recorded, and the complex stands unfinished as this history is written in November 2026 — the last major work of the ten-year plan, rising in the same ground where the Works Progress Administration built the first permanent cat house ninety years, or eighty-six, before: the record's two dates for that building are carried in its own entry above, and the disagreement is part of the inheritance the new complex succeeds.

Sources:

1. Potawatomi Zoo, Fall 2025 Uproar and the zoo's groundbreaking post, 14 August 2025 (Big Cat Tracks; $5.5 million; Amur leopards and tigers; "first physical expansion in decades").
2. South Bend Tribune, Ed Semmler, on the Big Cat Tracks groundbreaking and the master plan's final phase, 2025; season coverage, March 2026 (construction continuing).