Hippos in the Hood: The Upper West Side Can’t Get Enough of the Bloat

By Yvonne Vávra

The other day, I was waddling my way down still-icy 62nd Street next to Lincoln Center when I tumbled into an old acquaintance — a grande dame of style, the last one you’d want to be seen by stumbling across the block in a puffer jacket, snow boots, and zero care for couture. She, of course, would never let something as mundane as winter stop her from gracing the streets, ravishingly dressed in a pair of pointe shoes: Hippo Ballerina.

I remember first seeing Bjørn Okholm Skaarup’s sculpture in the hot summer of 2017. All 15 feet of her stood confidently in Dante Park at 64th and Broadway, gazing at Lincoln Center, as if enjoying the sweet sound of its calling.

Just a hippo in a tutu, hoping to make it big in New York City. I had no idea she was back in town! I’m happy to know she never gave up on her dreams — she’s simply plotting her big entrance from the sidelines this time. Maybe with some legal help, considering she’s standing right in front of Fordham Law School. Because, no, Mr. or Mrs. Casting Director, two and a half tons is not too heavy to leap through the air escaping gravity.

Come to think of hippos, the Upper West Side is actually full of them.

There’s a whole herd up on 91st Street and Riverside, wading in the water, splashing fountains into the sky, and not minding one bit when children climb on their noses or crawl into their bellies. What is now the Hippo Playground was built in 1937 as part of Riverside Park’s expansion. The hippos found their way into the space decades later when neighbors formed a group called “The Playground Project” and raised $120,000 in 1993 to commission a herd from American sculptor Bob Cassilly. Since then, they’ve been taking care of their 13-member squad and organizing free community events around the bloat all year round.

Meanwhile, Upper West Siders were hungry for more hippos. Bob Cassilly was asked once again to create sculptures — this time for the Safari Playground, which sits on a hill near the 93rd Street entrance of Central Park. The herd arrived in 1997, but New York City kids are a tough crowd, so eventually, the hippos fled back to Missouri to retire in Cassilly’s City Museum in St. Louis.

In their place, 14 unafraid successors took up the challenge, modeled after 3D scans of the original crew. “Artists created their skin, with scratching and molds, and when you look at the faces … we talked ad nauseam about some of these eyes,” Bob Rumsey, Studio Director of the Landscape Architecture Team at Central Park Conservancy, told the Rag back in 2019 when the playground reopened after a multi-million dollar revamp.

Are you counting? We’re at 27 Upper West Side hippos. That’s a whole lot of hippos, hippo-ing it up just a few blocks apart. And there’s another one lounging in the American Museum of Natural History, having a good time in the Upper Nile marshlands of South Sudan exhibit. Oh, and don’t forget the one in Central Park, playing the violin of all things. It’s part of a band of animals dancing to the Delacorte Clock’s tunes near the Children’s Zoo entrance. Sure, technically, that’s on the east side, but hey, the park belongs to each side entirely, am I right?

The zoo actually once had real hippos. Falstaff and Rosie had eight babies here, six of which survived. In 1974, they were supposed to move to a Toronto zoo along with their one-year-old baby, Daisy.

“Reluctant 10,350‐Lb. Hippo Family Packed for Trip”, reported the New York Times on August 9th, 1974. Apparently, the three put on quite the show for spectators when they refused to cooperate.

We’re not done here. There’s a happy-looking hippo squeaky toy at Petco on Broadway and 92nd, apparently undecided whether to join the playground pod two blocks west or the one three blocks east of it. At this point, it seems safe to assume we’re the leading neighborhood in New York City, hippo-wise.

Which brings us to the question: What does it all mean?

First of all, we’re lucky to have hippos around, because they’re a lot of fun. Did you know they can fly? Scientists have discovered that your average hippopotamus can become airborne for up to 0.3 seconds at a time when moving at speed. They also love to make honking noises — welcome to New York, gang! Of course, they do have a reputation for being ferocious, charging after anyone who dares to get too close to their territory. Again, welcome to the city.

Maybe the hippos chose the Upper West Side to remind us that even in our noisy, crowded lives, there’s always room for the unexpected, the imaginative, and the absurd. Maybe they want to encourage us to keep dreaming big, because we’re as brave as a hippo in a tutu and as tough as a sculpture on a city playground. Either way, when you’ve got 27 hippos on your block, you know you’re living in a place where the extraordinary is always just around the corner.

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Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.

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