page_title: Franklin Park (Boston)
section_title: Long Crouch Woods
hierarchical_section_title: Franklin Park (Boston) / Long Crouch Woods
caption_attribution_description: English: The ruins of the Bear Dens from the original Franklin Park Zoo from 1912 located in the Long Crouch Woods in Franklin Park.
context_page_description: Franklin Park, a partially wooded 527-acre parkland in the Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, and Dorchester neighborhoods of Boston, Massachusetts, is maintained by the City of Boston Parks and Recreation Department. It is Boston's biggest park and the site of Franklin Park Zoo. It was designated a Boston Landmark by the Boston Landmarks Commission in 1980.
context_section_description: The Long Crouch Woods, the location of the historic "Bear Dens", is also located within the park. Once the focus of the zoo, the Bear Dens were designed and built in 1912, and were planned to have a small collection of domestic animals. The original grounds featured a grand staircase leading to a large courtyard, framed by several large iron bear cages. One of these cages featured a detailed stone sculpture of bears and the crest of the City of Boston. Plans of expanding the Long Crouch Woods section of the zoo never came to fruition. As the grounds deteriorated, and as the Parks Department neglected many of the landscape's most basic management needs, the Bear Dens became too expensive to maintain. The exhibit area was officially closed in 1954. It was later lopped off of the zoo property permanently in 1958, when the Metropolitan District Commission took over management of the zoo.
  Efforts have been made since 1980 to make Long Crouch Woods into a nature preserve with a snack bar and theatre facility; however, plans have continued to stall. Today, it continues to be an area that is not well maintained or cleaned by the city. The Franklin Park Coalition cleared the trash out of the area in 2002, and in 2007 was awarded a grant of $36,000 for materials and professional landscaping work to restore paths in the Long Crouch Woods area of Franklin Park. The project will be completed with labor from summer youth crews comprising at-risk teens from the surrounding area.
caption: The ruins of the Bear Dens from the original Franklin Park Zoo from 1912 located in the Long Crouch Woods in Franklin Park, which are now unsuitable for housing bears.
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