Giant Ferris wheel finally turning in Golden Gate Park.
Seven months after its arrival, Ferris wheel gets on a roll in Golden Gate Park
“Wow! You can see boats, and the ocean, and buildings, and all that green stuff over there ( Marin County).” Max Kean, 10
At long last, the giant Ferris wheel in Golden Gate Park started doing on Wednesday what wheels are supposed to do. It started going round and round.
“All’s well that ends well,” said Todd Schneider, coowner of the 150foot SkyStar wheel as the long line of customers finally got a chance to climb aboard the behemoth at the east end of the Music Concourse. The wheel has been sitting idle for months, frozen in time by the pandemic.
“Wow!” said Max Kean, 10, of San Francisco, who took one of the first rides with his mother and his grandfather. “You can see boats, and the ocean, and buildings, and all that green stuff over there.”
“You mean Marin County,” said his mom, Desiree Delara.
Max said he wasn’t scared and his grandpa, John Delara, said he wasn’t scared either, being 85.
“I’ve jumped out of airplanes,” he said. “This is nothing compared to that.”
The drama that has plagued the giant wheel since its arrival in San Francisco in March continued to the
final moment. On Tuesday, Mayor London Breed and other dignitaries were prevented from taking a ceremonial ride on the wheel when CalOSHA safety inspector James Denny said he still had more inspecting to do. Denny and his footlong flashlight were back on the job early Wednesday and, while Schneider paced, the inspector finally delivered up the precious operating permit only six minutes before the posted public opening time of noon.
Schneider took the permit into the control booth and instructed his operator that it was OK, at long last, to push the “on” button.
“The inspector was certainly being very thorough,” Schneider said, searching for just the right word.
It was only the latest wrinkle in the longdelayed opening of the wheel. In March the dismantled wheel arrived in San Francisco on 14 trucks from its former home in Cincinnati. Plans called for it to spin in Golden Gate Park for a year, to help the park celebrate its 150th birthday, only to have the pandemic prevent it from operating.
The park’s birthday celebrations were largely called off, too. And the social justice protests of June, which led to the toppling of nearby statues of Ulysses Grant, Junipero Serra and Francis Scott Key, made the wheel’s long, lonely vigil in the park even lonelier.
All that was forgotten on
Wednesday, as the paying customers boarded the wheel’s 36 airconditioned passenger gondolas after passing a sign that warned, if they had vertigo or claustrophobia, they should think twice.
The only downer seemed to be the cost of a ticket, which is $ 18.
“It seems a bit pricey,” said Mark Carrington, who dropped by with his 11yearold daughter, Ashley. He conceded, however, that it was “less than a trip to Disneyland.”
Ruth Ann Gonzales strolled by with her dog, Netsa, and said the wheel looks beautiful but she hasn’t decided whether she will climb aboard.
“You’re riding in a small little enclosed space that a lot of other people have gotten in and out of,” she said. “And there’s a pandemic.”
The SkyStar, built in the Netherlands three years ago at a cost of $ 10 million, is the biggest Ferris wheel ever to spin in San Francisco. It was designed to be portable, or as portable as something can be that requires 14 trucks to get from place to place. Besides Cincinnati, it has already spun in Norfolk, Va., and Louisville, Ky.
SkyStar’s owners insist on calling it an “observation wheel” instead of a Ferris wheel, perhaps in the hope that the extra syllables will make customers forget the ticket price. When the wheel was in Cincinnati, a ride cost $ 12.50. Gondolas aren’t the only thing on Ferris wheels that go up.
From the top of the wheel on a clear day like Wednesday it was possible to see the ocean, the bay, the downtown skyline, the tops of the Golden Gate Bridge towers, and thousands of Richmond and Sunset district rooftops. At 150 feet — about one fourth the height of the Ferris wheel in Las Vegas — the SkyStar was not high enough to make people on the ground look like ants. They looked like people.
It was not immediately clear how much longer the wheel will remain in San Francisco. The original contract was for one year, but park officials and Schneider said they were open to continuing the run past March, depending on ticket sales. Under the terms of the contract, the city keeps $ 1 from each ticket sold.
The SkyStar is 6 feet taller than the 144foot viewing deck of the M. H. de Young Museum tower just next door, a vantage point with a similar vantage. The de Young tower also has the advantage of being free. The viewing deck remains closed for now, although the museum galleries have reopened.
Museum spokeswoman Helena Nordstrom said there is no immediate plan to reopen the viewing deck, because maintaining social distance in the deck elevators is not feasible.
“But we hope that Ferris wheel riders will take the opportunity to visit the museum,” she said, pointing out that a museum ticket, at $ 15, is cheaper and allows a visitor to stay all day instead of 12 minutes.