http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/ny...hore.html?_r=0
Rolling Out a Huge Wheel on the Staten Island Shore
By HELENE STAPINSKI
SEPT. 30, 2016
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When Rich Marin’s brand-new 300-foot-long legs arrive from Italy this weekend, he is hoping his friends will stop teasing him.
Mr. Marin is a giant of a man — 6-foot-5, 350 pounds — dwarfing everyone around him. But those legs don’t exactly belong to him; they belong to his latest project, a 630-foot Ferris wheel that is slowly coming together on the Staten Island shore.
“People say to me every day, ‘When are you going to start building?’” said Mr. Marin, the chief executive of the New York Wheel, which will become the biggest observation wheel in the world when it is finished in about a year and a half. “When the legs arrive, that’s the day people stop asking me.”
On a recent tour of the bustling work site, Mr. Marin tried to show how high the 60-story wheel would reach. But there were no reference points. “It’ll be right about where the sun is,” he said, squinting and pointing to the midmorning sky.
Construction has been going on for 16 months — and is about halfway done — but most of it has been below surface, laying the groundwork for the 20-million-pound wheel. The foundation is made of 8,000 cubic yards of poured concrete in 24 layers, with an inch and a half of rebar in each, Mr. Marin said. Reaching 100 feet into the bedrock are 96 caissons, which are now awaiting the leg pedestals.
The pedestals, weighing 110 tons, are being built in Montreal and will be arriving within the next two weeks. They will be delivered to the temporary dock at the waterfront site, and will connect to the four legs, which were made in Pescara, Italy, and were being shipped in eight pieces to the Brooklyn Marine Terminal. In a month, they will be delivered by barge to the Staten Island dock.
When installed this winter, the legs will reach as high as the nearby 19-story Castleton Park apartment houses behind the site of the New York Wheel.
Once the 1,300-ton spindle is put in place in March, the wheel will be built like a circular bridge, its rim growing section by section, with temporary spokes, explained Chris DeLuca, the project’s lead structural engineer. He said that once the permanent spokes were in place — 144 radial steel cables — capsules would be added. The 36 egg-shape glass pods will hold up to 40 people each for a 38-minute ride when the New York Wheel opens in April 2018. There will be pods with bars and luxury dining, and all New York City schoolchildren will ride free the first year.
Mr. DeLuca, whose projects include the new World Trade Center Tower 3, said the wheel was the most challenging project he had ever worked on. “Just the sheer size of the thing,” he said, “and then all the separate elements and so many people involved.”
Mr. Marin expects 3.5 million riders a year, most arriving on the Staten Island Ferry. Two and a half million tourists take the free ferry each year already, “but they just get right back on and head back to Manhattan,” he said. The wheel will give them incentive to stay.
The New York Wheel, Mr. Marin said, will look more delicate than its cousins in Singapore, London, Orlando and Las Vegas, which is now the biggest observation wheel, at 550 feet. Unlike Orlando, where the legs are splayed far out, the legs on the New York Wheel will be closer together because of the constraints of the building site. “This is going to be built like it’s on stiletto heels,” he said.
Mr. Marin moved to Staten Island from downtown Manhattan to be closer to the project and will very likely live there when it is done. He worked for 37 years as a Wall Street banker, and put his skills to work in securing funding for the project.
His job is not only to put the wheel up, but also to make sure it stays standing — through storms, hurricanes, earthquakes and whatever else comes its way.
“You know what this is?” he asked, holding a green cable. “Grounding for lightning strikes.” The wheel should be able to withstand a Category 3 hurricane, with winds up to 129 miles per hour. After ice storms, it will have to be de-iced like an airplane. Terrorism is also being taken into account.
“We want to make it impervious to collapse,” Mr. Marin said. “We’re doing blast analysis, what would happen if there was a pressure cooker or vehicular bombs.” The only thing he can’t guard against is an airborne attack, he said, glancing up at the clear blue sky. “We have to hope the U.S. military has that under control.”
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