Central Park Zoo owes its existence to a newspaper hoax.

In 1874, the New York Herald published terrifying accounts of a rhinoceros breaking free and unleashing pandemonium across Manhattan. A panther attacked churchgoers. The governor supposedly shot a Bengal tiger in the street. Forty-nine people died, the paper claimed, before admitting in the final paragraph that not one word was true.

The stunt exposed the "flimsiest cages ever seen" at the park's ramshackle menagerie and finally prompted the city to build a proper zoo. It had an unexpected side effect. When cartoonist Thomas Nast parodied the panic, he drew one political party as a lumbering elephant and the other as a braying jackass. The symbols stuck.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours use the zoo to trace how a fake disaster shaped real history, connecting the hoax to the political symbols Americans recognise today and revealing the stories behind Paul Manship's Art Deco gates and the Delacorte Clock's spinning animal orchestra.