The park serves as a divisor between the districts of Töölö to the west, and Hakaniemi and Kallio to the east.
The southern half of the park includes two bays of the Baltic Sea: Töölönlahti to the west, and Eläintarhanlahti to the east.
At the north-western end of the park, near the district of Laakso, is the Eläintarha Stadium, or "Eltsu" in slang.
The more popular one is that Henrik Borgström, whose company rented the park area from the City of Helsinki in the middle of the 19th century, had announced plans to build a zoo there, and by the 1880s, the name Eläintarha had been established in advance, anticipating the zoo, which never materialised.
The landscape of Töölönlahti in Eläintarha is portrayed in the famous painting The Wounded Angel by Finnish symbolist painter Hugo Simberg.