Lee Ehmke: Animating the zoo

Lee Ehmke first visited the Minnesota Zoo in 1999, and he was not impressed.

Its long-abandoned beluga whale tank sat empty. The architecture -- "North Korean" in his acid words, all bare concrete and sharp corners -- was depressing. And families had to trudge a lengthy trail to see animals that might never come closer than 100 feet.

"Honestly, it was a little disappointing," said the man who shortly afterward became the zoo's CEO.

Today, the enormous tank still sits there and the architecture is unimproved, but things appear to be looking up for a troubled institution that was never as beloved as the plucky Como Zoo in St. Paul.

Peak-season attendance, bumping along at 450,000 for a decade, shot suddenly to 650,000 last summer when he unveiled the $25 million "Russia's Grizzly Coast," featuring huge bears fighting to grab trout from a stream inches from visitors' faces. Memberships surged to an all-time high. Donations doubled and tripled.

And Ehmke's master plan is much more grand. He sees a revamped main building with airy walkways, sleek design, and face-to-face views of animals such as penguins and snow monkeys. He wants the main entrance swung around to the east, and with a much more inviting look, so visitors don't feel they're being led in past the loading dock. And the old whale tank would finally go, replaced by a theater.

But the moment of truth may be approaching. Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a vital ally in the zoo's $45 million surge in state support after decades of legislative disdain, is suddenly a lame duck, with only one bonding session to go. In a down economy, private donations -- which everyone hoped would accelerate right about now -- are sinking again. The zoo fell millions short of its goals in the most recent fiscal year.

Undaunted, Ehmke has ratcheted up the magnitude of his dreams. After talking years ago of a $100 million-plus master plan, he is now in the realm of $100 million just for the first pair of phases, with the most ambitious parts still to come.

The battle to wrench that vision into being already is quietly beginning, in oak-paneled downtown conference rooms and Wayzata country clubs. Moneyed donors are seeing soaring Hollywood animations of a reconceived zoo -- what Ehmke has been building toward for almost a decade.

Or perhaps, to hear him tell it, since childhood.

The child wanted to see zoos

"My dad was a music teacher, now retired, and my mother taught kindergarten and first grade," said Ehmke, 52. From their base in the Bay Area of California, "we travelled all summer, made cross-country trips, saw the national parks." And he, the eldest, "insisted on seeing all the zoos. My parents were very indulgent of my interest in animals."

As a young adult in California he followed a slightly zig-zag course, but always with the natural world in mind. He was an environmental lawyer, a landscape architect, and in the end, perhaps the world's tiniest occupational category: a zoo exhibit designer.

He landed a job at New York's Bronx Zoo, working for a powerhouse institution at a time of huge change in his field. Cutting-edge zoos were ramping up the dazzle factor by bringing in new dimensions of showmanship. Dennis McGrath, a member of the Minnesota Zoo board for most of Ehmke's term, remembers being taken to Ehmke's Congo exhibit in New York to see what he had in mind for Apple Valley.

"My whole thought was just, wow!" he recalls. "You sat in this darkened theater watching this film, which was very well done -- I mean, it's New York, the donors are people you've read about in Vanity Fair -- and then suddenly the film is over and the screen rises out of sight and the gorillas are standing right in front of you behind a wall of glass. It was just mind-blowing."

Waiting on the practice squad

When Ehmke came to Minnesota, it was a Brett Favre-like coup. The state had landed one of the hottest talents in the industry. But his vision for remaking the zoo had to wait. For years, the zoo struggled to get funding from the state and from donors. It was akin to making him wait on the practice squad. "Dark days," he recalls. Friends like Rick Barongi, director of the Houston Zoo, say it's remarkable he stuck it out.

Today, Ehmke admits he came here with no real concept of what a sour relationship Minnesota had with its sprawling suburban state-owned zoo, in contrast with Como, with its generations of childhood memories. "I didn't realize," he said, "how bad things had been here."

And McGrath, one of the state's top public-relations experts, admits he wasn't sure how Ehmke would fare in changing things. "To say that he is less than Obama as a speaker would not be pushing it," he said. "He's kinda shy. There's not a lot of presence."

One on one, though, Ehmke impresses, with a sharp candor that stops short of scorn but invites strangers into his world. He found an ally in Pawlenty, in whose legislative district the zoo is located, and who believed in state support for quality-of-life amenities.

"Russia's Grizzly Coast" is the biggest fruit of that alliance, not to mention special legislation granting Ehmke himself a much higher salary -- $225,000 -- than state officials are normally allowed, much of it from private donations.

This week, Ehmke and his girlfriend, Sue Chin, who oversees exhibit design for New York's zoos, will be competing in the same category for the nation's leading new zoo exhibit award, with Ehmke nominated for Grizzly Coast.

Will 'next big thing' happen?

But with Pawlenty's time running out, and state finances in tough shape, zoo officials are on edge about their prospects for the next big thing: the $70 million Heart of the Zoo project. They've commissioned a "public affairs audit," questioning civic leaders about their image of the zoo and its role in the community, and stressing its educational role.

"Let's not wait for it to fall apart," Ehmke said of the zoo's needs. "Literally the concrete façade on a lot of the building is falling apart."

He wants the repairs to be a remodel. First up on his list is a request for a $15 million down payment on his plan, which would begin to "encase" the main building in a new outer shell.

Original plan had flaws

The original zoo, laid out in the 1970s, was "an intellectual exercise," said Becca Hanson, a Seattle-based zoo designer whom Ehmke brought in to help draw up new plans, "without regard to the fact that people are walking around with small kids and were gonna get damn tired."

Or, as Ehmke puts it, "No young family wants to walk 6 miles to see a musk ox."

His plans shouldn't be a hopeless cause, he said, when voters in other states are agreeing to raise taxes to fund their zoos: $125 million in Oregon last fall in the teeth of the recession, for instance, and $15 million annually in metropolitan Detroit.

As uncertain as the future may seem, Ehmke swears the days of dark murmurs about job offers from elsewhere are over.

"I got this place when I decided to stay," Ehmke said, gazing from his Minneapolis living room upon a sparkling Lake Calhoun six floors below.

"I can walk from here to a great grocery store, or Punch Pizza, or a bookstore, I grab my bike and go around the lakes and all the way to the river. ... There's great pleasure in spring, summer and fall here. So I feel, yes, I'm here for some time to come."

David Peterson • 952-882-9023