Columbian Park Is Running on Two Different Clocks This Fall

On June 19, the Columbian Park Carousel turned again for the first time in more than twenty years. Mayor Tony Roswarski was there for the ribbon cutting. So was State Representative Sheila Klinker, who told the crowd her late husband Vic would have ridden every horse on the platform if he'd lived to see it happen. The restoration itself came from the Stevenson family, who funded the project in honor of Diane Stevenson's mother, Connie. As Diane put it that day, "we wanted to do something in honor of my mom, Connie Stevenson."

That's a nice story on its own. But if you live near Columbian Park, or you've been meaning to take the kids down for a ride now that it's running again, there's a detail in that reopening most people are missing: the carousel didn't come back on its own schedule. It came back on the zoo's.

The Zoo's Clock Ends in Mid-October

The Columbian Park Carousel operates daily, but only during regular zoo hours, and the last ride of the day happens fifteen minutes before the zoo closes for the night. That sounds like a small operational detail until you look at what happens to those hours once the calendar turns. The zoo shuts down for the winter every year from mid-October through mid-April, with one narrow exception: the ticketed Boo at the Zoo weekends in October.

Which means the carousel's return in June wasn't a permanent reopening so much as the start of one cycle. Since the ride is tied to zoo hours, and zoo hours stop in about six weeks, the carousel is heading toward its own second dark stretch not long after it woke up from the first one. Twenty years of silence, four months of running, then quiet again until spring, minus a handful of Halloween weekends. If you've been telling yourself there's plenty of time to get down there before the ride the family group texted about all summer disappears again, the window is shorter than the "it's finally back" headlines suggested.

Loeb Stadium Answers to a Different Calendar

Here's where it gets more interesting for anyone who thinks of Columbian Park as one thing that opens and closes together. It doesn't. The same 40 acres that hold the zoo and the carousel also hold Loeb Stadium, and Loeb Stadium isn't on the zoo's payroll or its hours.

Rebuilt in 2021 with a 2,600-seat capacity, Loeb Stadium is home field for the Lafayette Aviators and the Jefferson High School Bronchos, and it runs on a booking calendar set by Lafayette Parks and Recreation working alongside the Long Center for the Performing Arts and Honeywell Arts and Entertainment. That partnership books concerts and community events well past the point where the zoo goes quiet for the season. This fall alone:

• Dustin Lynch is scheduled to play Loeb Stadium on September 10, 2026, just days from now.
• The stadium's annual fall movie night tradition, a Parks and Recreation staple where families bring blankets onto the field itself, typically lands in October, after the zoo's seasonal shutdown has already begun.

So while one half of the park is counting down to a closure, the other half is still booking headline acts. If your mental model of Columbian Park is "it winds down in October," that's true for the animals, the butterfly garden, and the carousel. It is not true for the stadium sitting a few hundred feet away.

What the Overlap Actually Means This Fall

This is the part that actually changes how you plan a visit, and it's easy to miss if you only skim the zoo's hours page or only check the stadium's concert listings, since neither one tells you about the other.

If the carousel is the draw, and especially if it's the specific thing you've been waiting to show someone since it reopened in June, the honest advice is to go now, before the mid-October closure, rather than assuming a Halloween weekend will cover it. Boo at the Zoo is real, and it's worth planning around on its own terms. The event includes a Halloween Train Ride, the Peterman Brothers' "un-haunted hayride," inflatable games in the Wintek Family Fun Zone, and a pumpkin from the Subaru of Indiana Automotive Pumpkin Patch for kids twelve and under. Proceeds go to the Lafayette Parks Foundation, which puts money back into the park you're standing in. The zoo itself describes the weekend as full of "not-so-scary decorations, music, photo stops," which is a fair description if you've got younger kids who want the Halloween atmosphere without an actual scare.

But Boo at the Zoo is not a substitute for regular carousel access. It's a separate, narrower, ticketed event with its own hours, not an extension of the daily rides you can currently walk up and take. If you want the ordinary version, the one where you show up on a Tuesday evening and ride it twice because the line is short, that version has a deadline in about six weeks.

Meanwhile, if what you actually care about is Loeb Stadium, none of this urgency applies to you. The stadium's calendar isn't tied to the zoo's animal-welfare-driven seasonal hours at all. It will keep hosting shows into the part of the fall when the carousel has already gone dark for the year.

Why This Distinction Is Worth Knowing at All

Columbian Park has been the anchor of this neighborhood since 1893, and the zoo inside it, dating to 1908, is the second oldest in Indiana, home to nearly 200 animals across roughly 90 species. That kind of history tends to flatten in people's minds into a single seasonal rhythm: the park is open in summer, quiet in winter, done. What the carousel's reopening exposed this year is that the park has never actually run on one clock. It runs on at least two, set by two different institutions with two different sets of priorities, and they happen to share a parking lot.

For longtime residents, the split matters in a practical way: planning a visit around the right deadline means catching the thing you actually wanted to do, instead of missing it because you were tracking the wrong calendar. The carousel's silence lasted twenty years. Its first full season back lasts about four months. Knowing which countdown you're actually on is the whole difference between catching it and waiting until spring.

If you're the kind of Lafayette resident who tracks details like this because you actually live here, that's exactly the kind of local read Gibson Realty Group brings to every conversation, whether it's about the neighborhood you already call home or the one you're thinking about next. If a move is somewhere on your mind, even a distant one, Gibson Realty Group offers a free home valuation with no pressure attached, just the same level of local detail we bring to a story about a carousel.