A wealthy merchant named Ernst von Merck, a member of parliament in the German government at Frankfurt am Main in 1848 and 1849, assembled a society for the purposes of creating a zoo.

In 1861 it purchased a 13-hectare (32 acre) plot of land outside the Hamburg city walls, next to a municipal cemetery.

In 1865, a German national journal, Die Gartenlaube, declared an "Ocean Fairy Castle" superior to the aquarium of London.

The new facility revolutionized zoo design: instead of bars and cages, Hagenbeck became the first to use moats to separate animals from each other and the public.

In its early years, the Tierpark attracted as many as a million visitors annually, double the best audiences ever drawn to the Hamburg Zoological Garden.

In 1915 the Hamburg zoological Garden built the world's largest primate house, with 22 outdoor and 69 indoor cages.

The city of Hamburg took over the zoo's lease and converted the site into a public park (Planten un Blomen).