One of the places you can visit riding the St. Charles Streetcar Line in New Orleans, if you’ve a mind to, is Audubon Park. That’s what we did May 1989, even though it was (of course) hot and sticky that day. The park is home to the Audubon Zoo. Just the thing when you’ve had enough, for the moment, of the human-oriented diversions of the French Quarter.

These days there are about 2,000 animals in residence. It probably wasn’t much different then, spread out on 58 acres between St. Charles and the Mississippi, with a good many open-air exhibits. I don’t specifically remember Monkey Hill, but the story about that rise — built by the WPA — is that it was used to show local children what a hill looked like.

That wouldn’t have made much of an impression on me, considering that I came a place with hills. One time my friend Tom and I took a visitor from the East Coast to a substantial hill in Austin, and walked up it, just for the purpose of curing her of the notion that “Texas is flat.”

We took an amble through the zoo, seeing the likes of ostriches.

And rhinos. Or is that a hippo out of the water? I can’t quite tell just looking at the picture. Not visible here, but I’m pretty sure we saw a number of gators lurking around these waters.

Then there was this fellow.

As far as I can tell, that’s not Casey the gorilla, who seems to be locally known but who didn’t arrive at the zoo until long after we’d been there.