The hilltop zoo
The largest private zoo on earth, dispersed in the Depression — except the zebras, who stayed.
Animal Hill
Hearst wanted his guests’ five-mile drive up to the house to pass through an Eden, so the lower slopes were fenced into range for camels, kangaroos, bison, llamas, sambar deer and zebras, while Orchard Hill held cages and grottos — lions, cheetahs, polar bears in the California sun, an elephant named Marianne. Signs on the road gave the animals the right of way, and guests learned that a limousine waits for an emu as long as the emu requires.
Dispersal
The zoo was a fortune to feed, and when the empire’s finances cracked in 1937 it went the way of the art: sold and donated in lots to public zoos over the following years. The cages emptied; the grottos still stand along the tour road, occupied by nothing.
The zebras stayed
The grazing herds were harder to round up, and nobody tried very hard with the zebras. Their descendants — a herd now counted in the dozens, over a hundred by some tallies — still graze the Hearst Ranch pastures along Highway 1, photographed daily by startled motorists between San Simeon and Cambria. They are the estate’s best joke: the one collection that never went to the warehouse, walking around loose.