The shadows caught inside "Colonel" William Selig's Polyscope camera flickered across 2,000 feet of silent film in 1913 to tell the story of "Wamba, a Child of the Jungle," a 25-minute melodrama of "darkest Africa" shot around the Silver Lake Reservoir. Movies before World War I were made in New York, Chicago and Hollywood, but also, in Edendale (today's Los Feliz and Silver Lake), where Selig's menagerie of lions, leopards and elephants threatened heroines and mauled villains in the "jungle pictures" the Selig Polyscope Company made popular.
With bamboo props, paper ferns, actors in loincloths and a hut thatched with fronds from a fan palm, Selig made Edendale a barely believable simulation of the tropics. The animals, at least, were real. When they weren't appearing in a Selig movie, they were rented out to other film companies or performed for studio visitors.
Selig was successful, producing the first filmed version of "The Wizard of Oz" and movies based on classic novels like "The Count of Monte Cristo." In 1915, he opened a second, larger studio next to Eastlake Park (later Lincoln Park) in Lincoln Heights. Selig's collection of animals moved with the actors, sets and cameras.
Animal attractions were popular tourist destinations in turn-of-the-century Los Angeles. The Cawston Ostrich Farm (1886) in Pasadena was among the earliest. Selig's neighbors around Eastlake Park were the Los Angeles Ostrich Farm (1906) and the California Alligator Farm (1907). A tiny city zoo had occupied a corner of Eastlake Park until it moved in 1912 to new quarters in Griffith Park.
Selig's 35-acre site, with easy access by trolley and streetcar, created an opportunity — not for another animal farm but for a real zoo with elephants, tigers, lions, monkeys and hundreds of birds. And not just a zoo, but also a "pleasure garden" with a giant dance pavilion, roller skating rink and picnic grove with landscaped grounds large enough for 8,000 visitors. Film production at the rear of the park would go on, its jungle-like acres separated from the zoo by a security wall.
The Selig Zoo opened on June 20, 1915 with the arrival, said the Los Angeles Times, of "four elephants, two camels, two sacred cows [Brahman cows], ten tigers, ten leopards, seven lions, eight trick ponies, one boxing kangaroo and one trick mule. Fritz and Lena are the most valuable animals in the park. They are giraffes and are valued at $5,000 each."