San Francisco Zoo

The San Francisco Zoo is a 100-acre (40 ha) zoo located in the southwestern corner of San Francisco, California, between Lake Merced and the Pacific Ocean along the Great Highway.

Originally named the Fleishhacker Zoo after its founder, banker and San Francisco Parks Commission president Herbert Fleishhacker, the first exhibits of the zoo were built in the early 1930s. The WPA made the zoo a project in the mid-1930s.

San Francisco Zoo in Curious Notions

In Alternate 3477, where Imperial Germany had conquered the United States in 1956, the San Francisco Zoo (much like the rest of the San Francisco) was extremely run-down well into the late 21st century. After being promoted to a better job, Lucy Woo spent her now-free Saturdays at the zoo because it was quite affordable.

When the Woo family was forced to relocate to the home timeline, Lucy insisted that Paul Gomes take her to that version of the San Francisco Zoo. She was impressed by how much cleaner and well-maintained that version of the zoo was. The zoo in the home timeline was also home to cheetahs, which had gone extinct in the wild.

San Francisco Zoo in "The Fillmore Shoggoth"

The San Francisco Zoo was the only place in the world that had successfully bred cave penguins in captivity. Unfortunately, in Spring 1968, a swarm of shoggoths, which had floated up from Antarctica on an iceberg, attacked San Francisco. The shoggoths destroyed all manner of artifacts pertaining to the Old Ones, and murdered two Old Ones who'd been attending a concert at the Fillmore, as well as Howard Phillips, an expert on the Old Ones. One shoggoth, the first one off the iceberg, slaughtered all of the cave penguins at the zoo.

The band HPL, who were performing at the Fillmore until the shoggoths attacked, went to see the penguins upon the band's morning arrival in the city. By that evening, the penguins were all gone. HPL's leader George, who'd seen the deaths of the Old Ones and Phillips at the Fillmore, was actually more upset about the death of the harmless penguins than anything else he'd seen.