Lincoln Park ZooLights

About This Event

ZooLights turns Lincoln Park Zoo into a low-cost holiday lights display for six weeks every winter: 3 million-plus lights strung across the zoo grounds, most evenings from 4:30 to 9 PM, right in the middle of one of the only privately-funded free zoos left in the country. It's not open every single night in that window, though — closed Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day, plus a few December Tuesdays — but it does run both New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.

The zoo itself is old: 1868, one of the oldest in the country, its start traced to a gift of two swans from New York's Central Park. It's stayed free and privately funded the entire time since, one of the last zoos like it left in the U.S. ZooLights is much younger — it debuted in 1995 with about 100,000 lights mounted on steel display frames, a fraction of what's up now. Three decades of adding more lights every year turned it into one of Chicago's biggest annual holiday draws.

Worth knowing before you go: it's no longer fully free — tickets run $7–10, with free entry on select Mondays that still require an online reservation. And since the closure dates aren't published as one simple rule, check lpzoo.org for the exact schedule before building a whole evening around a specific date, rather than assuming every night in the Nov 20–Jan 3 window is open.