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Ranked shortlist · 10 of 10 zoos
Best zoos in Philadelphia
The 10 most notable zoos in Philadelphia, in rank order. The order is curation quality — how well attested and how complete each record is — not popularity, and no place on this list paid to be on it.
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1
Big Cat Falls
3400 W Girard Ave
366 m from Zoological Garden, rail
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website, a phone and an address · Overture confidence 0.99 · rank score 2.311, percentile 100 of 10
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2
John Paul Endicott Memorial Garden
580 Meetinghouse Rd
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website, a phone and an address · Overture confidence 0.97 · rank score 2.204, percentile 88.89 of 10
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3
Philippian Gardens
5110 N 6th St
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website, a phone and an address · Overture confidence 0.97 · rank score 2.190, percentile 77.78 of 10
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4
Bear Country
N 34th St
230 m from Zoological Garden, rail
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website, a phone and an address · Overture confidence 0.92 · rank score 1.837, percentile 66.67 of 10
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5
Jungle Joe's Wildlife Adventures
352 2nd Street Pike Ste 150
754 m from Southampton, rail
listed by Microsoft and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website, a phone and an address · Overture confidence 0.92 · rank score 1.837, percentile 55.56 of 10
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6
Giraffe Habitat
3400 W Girard Ave
332 m from Zoological Garden, rail
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website, a phone and an address · Overture confidence 0.92 · rank score 1.837, percentile 44.44 of 10
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7
Philadelphia Zoo
3400 W Girard Ave
273 m from Zoological Garden, rail
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website, a phone and an address · Overture confidence 1.00 · rank score 1.720, percentile 33.33 of 10
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8
Philadelphia Zoo
3300 Fairmount Ave
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website, a phone and an address · Overture confidence 0.99 · rank score 1.657, percentile 22.22 of 10
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9
KidZooU
3400 W Girard Ave
267 m from Zoological Garden, rail
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a phone and an address · Overture confidence 0.95 · rank score 1.652, percentile 11.11 of 10
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10
Philadelphia Zoo
133 m from City Hall, metro
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website · Overture confidence 0.97 · rank score 0.754, percentile 0 of 10
How this list is made
Every place in this group was scored by the same model, with each term z-normalised inside the group and capped, so a famous chain cannot win by being famous everywhere. The weights, verbatim:
- attestation by independent providers
- +0.35
- record completeness (website, phone, address)
- +0.25
- Overture existence confidence
- +0.20
- Michelin designation (Wikidata, CC0)
- +0.40
- brand fame (Wikidata sitelinks)
- −0.15
- same-name chain collision
- −0.30
Curation quality, not popularity: how well attested and how complete a record is.
No licensable popularity signal; this ranks curation quality, not taste
Independent check: 5,951 places listed in Wikivoyage (CC BY-SA 4.0; validation only, never published or scored) were matched to our records by name within 250 m. Across the 5,651 that fall in groups of at least 10, the median matched place sits at percentile 73 and 24.2% are in the top decile, against 10% by chance; five families have enough anchors to report (arts, food and drink, lodging, shopping, sport), while health care (5), lifestyle services (17), travel (26) have too few and are not validated. A match needs both the guide and the catalogue to name the same place, which favours well-attested places — a term this rank itself rewards — so these are lower bounds; Michelin's 528 in-group anchors have a median percentile of 100, but that is partly circular: across the Wikivoyage matches, the 17 that also carry the designation term this rank scores sit at 99.93, against 72.55 for the 5,934 without it.
The catalogue carries no rating, review count, price or opening hours, so this file has none.
Station locations from Wikidata (CC0-1.0). Nearest station, not service: no frequency, timetable or departures.
Nobody paid for placement: no ads, no sponsored results, no ratings for sale.
Data: AllThePlaces (CC0-1.0), BrightQuery (CDLA-Permissive-2.0), DAC (CDLA-Permissive-2.0), Foursquare Open Source Places (Apache-2.0), Meta (CDLA-Permissive-2.0), Microsoft (CDLA-Permissive-2.0), Overture Maps Foundation (CDLA-Permissive-2.0), PinMeTo (CDLA-Permissive-2.0), RenderSEO (CDLA-Permissive-2.0).