![]() To understand how this magnificent silverback gorilla ended up living in a concrete cell in a rundown strip mall in Tacoma, you have to go back to 1964. I’ve been coming to see him since I was a little girl,' ” Schmidt said. “I remember one lady, I asked her, did it trouble her the situation he was in, and she was like, 'Oh, no. What surprised her was how some people who’d lived in Tacoma all their life saw his predicament. It’s like being in solitary but where everybody can see you all the time,” Schmidt said. Little kids would come and tap on the window, and people would take photos. “It’s funny, when you mentioned Ivan, I’m like, I still think about Ivan all the time because it was just one of the saddest things that I saw. “For me, I didn’t really know what to expect when I went there, and when I went in there, I was just devastated,” Schmidt said.Īt the time, she was doing a story for NPR about Ivan, who was in the news because animal rights activists were pushing to get the gorilla relocated to a more appropriate environment. ![]() Suffice it to say, her impression was a little bleaker than what’s portrayed in the movie. My friend and former colleague Jenny Schmidt visited the store in the early 1990s. There was a window so people could look in at him. Believe it or not, the movie was inspired by real events that actually played out in our area, in south Tacoma.The popularity of the movie got me thinking about the true story of Ivan the gorilla and his lasting legacy for Tacoma.įor nearly 30 years, beginning in the 1960s, the real Ivan lived in a concrete enclosure inside the B&I shopping center on South Tacoma Way. If you’ve seen Disney’s family film “The One and Only Ivan,” you know it tells the story of a lovable gorilla who lives in a shopping mall with other talking animals but longs to return to the natural world to be among other gorillas. ![]()
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