Fall Fest at Lincoln Park Zoo

About This Event

Lincoln Park Zoo doesn't charge for Fall Fest for the same reason it doesn't charge for anything: free admission has been official park-commissioner policy since 1878, a decade after the zoo got its start from a gift of two pairs of swans sent by New York's Central Park commissioners. It's now the oldest continuously free zoo in the country and the only privately managed one that's never charged at the gate — worth knowing before you brace for a ticket price that was never coming.

Fall Fest itself runs weekends from late September through Halloween weekend: a pumpkin patch, carvers working in real time, live music, and seasonal animal enrichment, where keepers hide pumpkins and gourds around habitats for the animals to find and destroy on camera. The zoo and the festival programming are free, same as always; the slide, Ferris wheel, and bounce house are the only ticketed parts.

Worth knowing: it's a tight window, 10 AM to 5 PM, weekends only, so budget time if seeing the animals is also the plan — the ticketed rides draw a real line by early afternoon on a nice Saturday.