If you've ridden the BMX Loop at Walnut Creek Metropolitan Park, you've probably passed a stretch of rusted iron half swallowed by ivy and figured it was just old fence line, the kind of debris every big park accumulates over the decades. It isn't fence line. It's what's left of a roadside zoo that used to keep alligators caged next to lions, on the same ground your neighborhood dog walk now crosses.
River Oak Lake Estates sits right up against the southern edge of this 293-acre park, and Wells Branch Creek runs from the subdivision straight into it before joining Little Walnut Creek. Most residents know the park for its pool, its playground, and the fifteen miles of trail that make a Saturday morning loop easy to string together. Fewer know that one of those loops threads directly through the footprint of a private zoo that operated on this exact stretch of North Lamar for roughly 40 years.
A Gas Station That Grew Fangs
The story starts in 1936, when Alvin W. Cox and his wife bought 55 acres about four miles north of the Austin city limits and built a fueling station and convenience store along what was then called the Dallas Highway. Cox picked up a pet monkey for the family not long after. Customers stopped coming in for gas and started coming in for the monkey. By 1939 he'd turned that novelty into an actual zoo, and it grew from there: turtle doves, parrots, a pelican, foxes, wolves, bobcats, and eventually alligators housed right beside the lion cage.
Cox's mother, meanwhile, built a rock garden nearby, adding stones collected from around the world and shaping miniature clay buildings to set among them. Between the animals and the rock garden, Coxville Zoo became a genuine stop for families driving that stretch of North Lamar, not a curiosity you'd read about after the fact but a place people actually pulled off the road to visit.
The zoo ran for close to four decades before closing in the 1970s under pressure from the Humane Society and the City of Austin. The land eventually became part of what the city now manages as Walnut Creek Metropolitan Park.
The Ground Remembers
None of that history got cleared away when the park absorbed the site. If you ride or walk the BMX Loop today, the old cages are still there just off the trailhead, rusted through and wrapped in ivy, alongside what's left of a barn that's mostly collapsed into itself. It's not staged or interpreted with a plaque. It's just sitting in the woods the way it's been sitting for fifty years, and you'll walk right past it if you don't know to look.
The trail itself is an easy loop, which makes this an approachable stop rather than a bushwhacking expedition:
| Trail | Distance | Elevation gain | Typical time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Windy Loop + BMX Loop | 2.5 miles | 141 feet | 30 to 60 minutes |
The route runs close enough to North Lamar that traffic noise carries in on a few stretches, which is the tradeoff for how easy the access is from the neighborhood side of the park. It's not a wilderness trail. It's a loop you can do before work.
The Temple Where the Lion Cage Stood
Here's the detail that makes the whole thing click into place. The Thien Hau Temple, a small Buddhist temple built in the early 2000s, now sits at 12248 North Lamar Boulevard, right at the corner of North Lamar and West Yager Lane. That address is not adjacent to the old zoo grounds. It's on them. Local accounts describe the temple's grounds as the same acreage where Cox once kept his menagerie, with the BMX trail's looping singletrack running right alongside it.
Visitors describe the temple as small and quiet, with outdoor shrines, a wishing well, and an elderly caretaker who tends the space. Where there was once a wooden donation sign asking visitors to help cover the cost of feeding wolves and alligators, there's now a place built for quiet reflection. The zoo's footprint didn't get erased. It got repurposed twice: once by the parks department, and once by a congregation that had no idea it was building on top of Cox's old cages.
The Church That Predates All of It
Push the timeline back further and there's a third layer. Walnut Creek Baptist Church sits just south of the park and is the oldest continuously operating church in Travis County, founded in 1856 by the Cearley family and other early settlers using pine timbers hauled in from Bastrop and local limestone. Local lore holds that the outlaw Sam Bass once stashed stolen loot inside the church walls, decades before Cox ever bought his first acre of land up the road.
None of this is buried in a museum archive. It's stacked in layers within a half mile of homes in River Oak Lake Estates: an 1856 church with an outlaw legend attached to it, a 1930s roadside zoo that grew out of a gas station monkey, and a 2000s temple built on the exact ground where that zoo's animals were caged. The park absorbed all three eras without erasing any of them.
Why This Matters on an Ordinary Saturday
None of this changes what the park is for on a normal week. People still use Walnut Creek Metropolitan Park for the pool, the ball fields, the playground, and the off-leash creek stretches where dogs cool off in the shallow water when the flow is running. That's the everyday function, and it's not going anywhere.
What changes is what you're looking at while you're out there. The next time you're on the BMX Loop and you pass rusted iron in the brush, you'll know it's not scrap left over from park maintenance. It's what's left of a place where a family fed 224 bananas and 374 pounds of meat to a menagerie every single week, funded by donation cans that barely covered a third of the cost. The Austin Parks and Recreation Department's own trail documentation traces the Northern Walnut Creek Trail's expansion through this same corridor, connecting Balcones District Park to the metro park and eventually east toward Govalle, without a single mention of what used to stand here. The city built infrastructure over the story. The story is still visible if you know where to look.
That's the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a portal listing or a walk score. It shows up when you've actually spent enough time in a neighborhood to notice what's underfoot.
If you're weighing a move into River Oak Lake Estates, or you already live here and you're curious what else the neighborhood has stacked into its own backyard, reach out to CBSrealty. Call Chet for a free home consultation, and ask him what else is hiding along the trail behind your street. After three decades working these North Austin pockets, he's got more stories like this one than the map will ever show you.
