World’s Tallest Ferris Wheel Planned for Staten Island
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg
said on Thursday that the world’s tallest Ferris wheel would rise above the Staten Island waterfront. The 625-foot-tall ride will displace the
Singapore Flyer, at 541 feet the record-holder of the moment.
And what about the
High Roller wheel planned for Las Vegas? The New York wheel will reach 75 feet farther into the sky. It will dwarf the 13-year-old
London Eye by 182 feet and the
original Ferris wheel, built for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, by 361 feet.
As
if those statistics were not enough, here are more: The Staten Island
wheel will be almost three times the height of the largest Ferris wheel
in the United States, the 212-foot machine at the Texas State Fair. As
it happens, the Texas wheel is the same size as the
Riesenrad in Vienna, which figured in movies like
“The Third Man” (1949) and
“Scorpio” (1973).
Locally, the new wheel will be more than 10 times the height of
the 60-foot one at the Toys “R” Us store in Times Square. Never mind that that wheel is indoors.
The
Staten Island wheel — on which construction is expected to begin in two
years, with an opening goal of 2015 — will be big in other ways. It
will carry 1,440 people at once, 10 times as many as the
Wonder Wheel
in Coney Island (which, for the record, was originally called the
Dip-the-Dip). The Singapore Flyer can accommodate only 840 at a time,
the London Eye 800 (the passenger load of 11 double-decker buses,
according to the London Eye’s Web site).
Still, the race is on.
Norman D. Anderson, the author of “Ferris Wheels: An Illustrated
History” (Popular Press, 1992), wondered how long the new New York wheel
would reign as No. 1. “Everybody has to have something a little
bigger,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time before we go to 1,000
feet.”
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/worlds-tallest-ferris-wheel-planned-for-staten-island/
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