Build it and they (tourists) will come
NEW YORK: It does not cost anything to take the boat there. A quaint waterfront minor league baseball stadium offers sweeping views of lower Manhattan and cheap tickets. A fort dating to the War of 1812 is one of the country’s oldest military installations. There had been talk of a Nascar track.
And yet the problem persists — how to get tourists to venture out onto Staten Island and not take the next ferry right back to Manhattan.
Now, New York City officials believe they have the answer: a gigantic wheel. Or, more precisely, a 192-metre (630-foot) tall one that would become one of the world’s largest Ferris wheels.
It is the city’s latest and arguably most ambitious attempt to draw tourists to Staten Island.
Workers have begun laying the foundation for the wheel, which, when it opens for business in two years, will carry as many as 1,440 riders and be visible across New York Harbour.
Every year, two million tourists ride the Staten Island Ferry, and yet most of them never leave the terminal.
“What’s great is that people do come to Staten Island; they just have nothing to get off the ferry for,” said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the Centre for an Urban Future. “People on the ferry are going to see this huge wheel beckoning, and lots of people are going to want to do it.”
“Tourism officials are already promoting the wheel, along with the new Whitney Museum of American Art and the observatory atop One World Trade Center, as part of the new New York,” said Fred Dixon, chief executive of NYC & Co, the city’s marketing and tourism organisation.
“We were bullish on the idea from the beginning,” he said recently in an interview from London, one of the European cities where he had been promoting the wheel.
“The wheel and a sprawling outlet mall are known collectively as ‘Destination St George,’ and will be a game-changer in the quest to attract more tourists to that Staten Island neighbourhood,’’ Dixon said.
“There’s no question that’s been the single biggest challenge,” he said, “to convince them to get off the ferry and spend some time there.”
But before the wheel can attract anybody, it has to be designed, fabricated, shipped in pieces to New York from around the world, delivered to the site on barges and erected like a gigantic K’nex project.
The city’s Economic Development Corp has asked the Army Corps of Engineers for permission to build a temporary pier for the unloading of the barges.
With so many moving parts, the wheel still presents many hurdles for developers. But Rich Marin, president and chief executive of the New York Wheel, said financing was not one of them.
His company is close to raising the full $500 million it will need to build the wheel along with a terminal building and parking garage. Nearly one-third of that sum, $150 million, has been collected from 300 Chinese families that invested with the hope of receiving visas through a programme run by the federal immigration service.
Marin, who worked on Wall Street for years, said that the wheel “might not have been built” without the Chinese investors, and that their enthusiasm was a “very strong indicator” of the project’s viability.
A report issued in September by the city’s Independent Budget Office estimated that the Staten Island Ferry draws 1.8 million riders from out of town annually. Most of them take the free ride to get a closer look at the Statue of Liberty.
Tourism officials and Marin project that 3.5 million people will visit the wheel every year, which would make it as popular as the statue.
The wheel was originally proposed for Governors Island, which is closer to Manhattan and the Brooklyn waterfront.