SALON

Friday, Sep 28, 2012 1:15 AM UTC

NYC to round out skyline with tallest Ferris wheel

By

Topics: From the Wires,

NYC to round out skyline with tallest Ferris wheelSen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg stand next to an artist rendering of a proposed Ferris wheel during a news conference on the Staten Island borough of New York, Thursday, Sept. 27, 2012. The proposed 625-foot Ferris wheel, billed as the world's largest, planned as part of a retail and hotel complex along the Staten Island waterfront in New York. The attraction, called the New York Wheel, will cost $230 million. Officials say the observation wheel will be higher than the Singapore Flyer, the London Eye, and a "High Roller" wheel planned in Las Vegas. Beyond the wheel is the Manhattan skyline.(AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)(Credit: AP)

NEW YORK (AP) — The Big Apple is getting another “biggest”: the world’s tallest Ferris wheel, part of an ambitious plan to draw New Yorkers and tourists alike to the city’s so-called “forgotten borough.”

The 625-foot-tall, $230 million New York Wheel is to grace a spot in Staten Island overlooking the 305-foot-tall Statue of Liberty and the downtown Manhattan skyline, offering a singular view as it sweeps higher than other big wheels like the Singapore Flyer, the London Eye and a “High Roller” planned for Las Vegas.

Designed to carry 1,440 passengers at a time, it’s expected to draw 4.5 million people a year to a setting that also would include a 100-shop outlet mall and a 200-room hotel.

It will be “an attraction unlike any other in New York City — in fact, it will be, we think, unlike any other on the planet,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said as he unveiled the plans against the backdrop of New York Harbor. While the privately financed project faces various reviews, officials hope to have the wheel turning by the end of 2015.

The wheel would put Staten Island on the map of superlatives in a place where “biggest” is almost an expectation — home to the nation’s biggest city population, busiest mass-transit system, even the biggest Applebee’s restaurant.

The attraction stands to change the profile of the least populous and most remote of the city’s five boroughs, a sometime municipal underdog that has taken insults from New Jersey and was once known for having the world’s largest … landfill.

“It’s going to be a real icon. The Ferris wheel will be Staten Island’s Eiffel Tower,” Sen. Charles Schumer enthused.

As a visible addition to the skyline around the harbor, the wheel “gives Staten Island an identity beyond its role as a suburban community,” while letting it tap into the stream of tourist money in a city that drew 50.9 million visitors last year, said Mitchell Moss, a New York University urban policy professor.

The project is expected to bring $500 million in private investment and 1,100 permanent jobs to the borough’s St. George waterfront, and the developers will pay the city $2.5 million a year in rent for the land.

Staten Island isn’t entirely off the tourist map. Its free ferry is the city’s third-largest tourist attraction, carrying an estimated 2 million visitors a year alongside millions of residents, officials say.

But the city has long struggled to entice tourists off the boat and into Staten Island. Much-touted Staten Island sightseeing bus tours fizzled within a year in 2009 for lack of ridership.

Australian tourists Leah Field and Adam Lica, for example, were riding the ferry Thursday for its views of the Statue of Liberty. They thought they might have lunch on the Staten Island side but weren’t planning to explore further.

“We weren’t sure what there is to do there,” explained Lica, 32, of Melbourne. But were there a giant Ferris wheel, the couple likely would go ride it, he said.

But Henriette Repmann, a German university student, said she wouldn’t bother.

“You don’t have to have the biggest Ferris wheel in the world to get a good view of New York,” Repmann, 20, of Leipzig, said Thursday as she visited the Empire State Building.

Largely a bedroom community for other parts of the city, Staten Island boasts about 470,000 residents and a minor league ballpark, cultural sites and quirky attractions, from locations in the video for Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” to the Staten Island Zoo, home to New York’s answer to Pennsylvania’s prognosticating groundhog. The Staten Island rodent bears the dubious distinction of having once bitten Bloomberg.

But Staten Island, the only one of the city’s five boroughs not accessible by subway, tends to get overshadowed by its bigger neighbors, so much so that some have at times suggested it secede from the city.

And residents often bristle at an image shaped by such television shows as “Mob Wives” and “Big Ang” — and by a former New Jersey beach town mayor who portrayed Staten Islanders in a blog post as heavy on hairspray and light on class. (The ex-mayor, Ken Pringle of Belmar, visited Staten Island in 2008 to make amends.)

Resident Miatta Bryant thinks the wheel might bring the borough more respect.

“People always say Staten Island is so boring,” the 26-year-old certified nursing assistant said.

The Ferris wheel, state Assemblyman Matthew Titone hopes, will show the world a different Staten Island than the one they see on TV.

“They will see our cultural institutions and will see that we are not idiots,” he said. “Shirtless, musclebound idiots.”

___

Associated Press writer Verena Dobnik and researcher Jennifer Farrar contributed to this report.

___

Follow Jennifer Peltz at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz

More Jennifer Peltz.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations