Still Skating on Thin Ice
As some of you know by now, I spent six years working on building the New York Wheel on New York Harbor. There are lots of stories about those times that involved figuring out how to finance and refinance this massive attraction, working through significant partnership wrangles, seeking and getting approvals from the City and the Borough of Staten Island not to mention every imaginable agency in between (Federal, State , City and Local) and most of all, the physical fabrication and erection and construction issues. There was nothing about the project that was easy. After a career on Wall Street innovating in such arenas as derivatives , emerging markets debt and every creative new alternative investment product you can imagine, I thought I had done it all and been through the roughest proving ground in the world. But that was simply not the case. Nothing can compare to the physics and metallurgy challenges hat I faced with the New York Wheel. When we started having trouble with the building of the wheel itself, I was perplexed enough to seek out one of the top structural engineers in the world. He is a Danish professional who had most recently designed and built the Drogden Tunnel, which is part of the 16 kilometer long bridge and tunnel sequence called the Oresund that connects Denmark and Sweden across the Baltic Sea. He told me that this masterpiece of structural engineering took five full-time structural engineers five years to complete. He went on to tell me that to build the New York Wheel would require twenty-five such engineers for five years to do the same. That was an eye opener since we had budgeted a three year build and had a team of two part-time structural engineers involved (though many others came and went in an attempt to add their two cents worth to the project).
During those six years I found myself creating and using many different catch phrases to capture the challenge of the moment. On the issue of the engineering I used to say that we were pushing the limits of what physics and metallurgy understood. I think there is ample evidence now that suggests that we were actually trying to go well over those limits without realizing it. The truth is that we got stopped before we could ever go vertical on the project, even though the largest elements of the wheel, the legs, were already sitting on a dock in Brooklyn (having been fabricated on the Adriatic Coast of Italy) and the thirteen rim sections were sitting waiting on the coast of Turkey where they had been fabricated. The real evidence seems to have come due to an approval I gave back in 2013. That’s when our partner, a Dutchman who had worked as the structural engineer on the famous and highly successful London Eye (erected in 1999-2000 for the turn of the Millennia) approached me with a request. He was being asked to design a similar wheel for the Crown Prince of Dubai. In fact, he wanted to propose a wheel that was even larger than ours but designed to look very similar. That design was a retread of a design he had originally created for a giant observation wheel for Beijing in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympic Games that were to be held there. That project never materialized, but instead he worked on the Singapore Flyer Wheel that opened that year with a very different design.
The Singapore Flyer was, for a while, the world’s largest observation wheel, having exceeded the height of the London Eye, which was 443 feet, and rose to the height of 541 feet. It had been built by Mitsubishi of Japan and when I inquired about whether they would bid on the New York Wheel project, was told that they had a very terse answer for me. They simply said. “Never again!” That should have been a big red flag for me, but it wasn’t. While I was planning the New York Wheel, there was another wheel under construction in Las Vegas called the High Roller. It is 550 feet, so, at the time, scheduled to become the tallest observation wheel in the world. The day of the announcement of the New York Wheel, I got an unsolicited call from the head of one of New York’s premier private equity firms telling me that the High\ Roller was his project and that he would like to offer me whatever advice I needed since the project had been a monumental challenge to build. That should have been my second red flag. Meanwhile, my Dutchman was soothing my concerns by explaining that his new design would overcome all of those concerns and challenges. We had diligenced the guy thoroughly and he was who he said he was and was so much the source authority on large observation wheels that we had established an exclusivity arrangement such that he needed to seek our permission to take on other new projects like the proposed Dubai wheel. My theory in granting him the permission was quite straightforward. Dubai was not a competitor for a New York attraction and regardless of the height, I always knew that someone would build a higher one than the one we were building, but I always figured New York was New York and that would be what made it special, rather than being the tallest for a moment. I also figured that the Crown Prince, given all his money, could be the deep-pocketed test bed for the various things that we would learn at their expense. It was a grand theory, but little more.
To begin with, while the Dubai money and regulatory situation allowed that project to rush ahead of ours, my Dutch friend was thrown off that job and sued by Dubai, who chose to take his design and proceed with it without him. Those things happen on projects, but it did make me wonder why they were so unhappy with him. I had become quite friendly with the Dutchman, so we spoke at length about it. He was a real Dutchman and what I mean by that is that his favorite pastime was ice skating. Do you remember the story of Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates? Well, this guy lived that life and would go out every weekend in the winter skating for long distances on the canals of Holland. He was a very convincing guy, who had good excuses for all the bad things that had happened to every wheel project he had ever worked on, including the Dubai wheel.
The history of giant observation wheels is littered with stories. The London Eye did not make its opening mark for the turn of the Millenia, but opened three months later. Along the way, it had a few harrowing days when the wheel structure was being tilted up and had to be paused mid-lift due to a technical problem. That very visible problem had the town of London on the edge of its seat for a few days until it was corrected. The Singapore Flyer went bankrupt shortly after it opened and when it was reopened it had to start turning in the opposite direction due to a technical problem. To this day, it closes down every time the breeze starts to blow. As for the Las Vegas High Roller, it opened years late and has never been much of a draw. It is now totally eclipsed by The Sphere, which sits a block away and is far more spectacular. We all know the New York Wheel was never completed, but the Ain Dubai of Dubai Eye did open finally in October, 2021 at a spectacular height of 820 feet (much higher than the planned 630 feet of the New York Wheel). However, after only several months of operation is closed in March, 2022 due to technical difficulties and has not reopened since.
I know that my Dutch friend has yet again been sued for the failure of his design, but I also know that other than his silver skates, they probably have little to gain from the suit. It seems the Dutchman is still skating on thin ice. He’s a wonderful guy and I wish him well, but I suspect that his days of designing and building giant observation wheels is behind him for good now.