Something really BIG is happening in full view of lower Manhattan, New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It’s so big it’s going to be a HUGE tourist attraction. But I’ve discovered that most of the New Yorkers I talk to have never heard of it, although construction has been going on for more than two years. Maybe it’s because it’s taking place on Staten Island, often called the “forgotten borough.”
Maybe we don’t notice because it’s a construction project and obviously, that’s not an unusual sight for NYC. If you look at the North Shore of Staten Island, just past the Staten Island Yankee baseball stadium and the gentle white wings of the memorial for 911, you’ll see a lot of activity around an unfinished three story, long building with a parking garage in the back. That building will get more interesting as it’s completed because it will have a huge beer garden overlooking the harbor and a “green” roof that is a beautiful park.
Maybe we haven’t noticed because the building is horizontal. How about adding something strikingly vertical? Enter two enormous cranes, compliments of the Dutch company, Mammoet-Starneth, LLC that have the specialty of transporting these humongous tools to build mammoth constructions. The cranes are so big they have to be assembled on site. The larger one is the third largest in the world! These crawler cranes, which are on tracks and can move on the ground, are being prepared to hoist into place the legs of a giant observational wheel, or GOW, called The New York Wheel.
Roxie Munro and I are working on a book about the Wheel. (I’m on the left). The cab of the giant crane is where it says “MOET.” You’re looking at the back of the crane. The red, white and gray objects are ballast that hang from the short boom. The large boom is lying on the ground. On the right you can see a leg pedestal awaiting the lower leg The small brown extrusions are where the anchor bolts go. There are two conical “dowels”that fit into depressions in the leg. The pipes in the center are for electrical wires.
This is no easy lift. Each of the four legs has two sections of fabricated steel—the strongest that can be manufactured. Most I bars are made of structural steel with a tensile strength of 36 kilo pounds per square inch. The New York Wheel legs are made of steel with a structural strength of almost double -- 70 kps. They are dense and extremely heavy, the first segment of a lower leg weighs more than 300 tons and is about 150 feet long.
Each lower leg segment will be placed on a specially designed pedestal that has been waiting for it. The structure of the legs is an A-Frame so each lower leg will be tilted. When finished the 630 foot New York Wheel will be 50% taller than the London Eye at 440 feet , and 80 feet higher than the next largest GOW, the High Roller in Las Vegas. For a while, at least, it will be the largest Wheel in the world. It’s going to be lit up at night. You won’t be able to miss it.
The tops of the leg segments will be lifted by the enormous crawler crane, sitting on the ground within reach of the four leg pedestals. It is backed with piles of ballast that will be hung on the small boom to counterbalance the weight of the leg. The smaller crane will run around the outside and control the angle of the lower edge of the leg as it settles into its new home. I spoke to Bruce Flowers, the crane assembly director. He will also be in the cab for the first lower leg segment. Currently the large boom is 150 feet long, but it’s getting another piece that’s still in Brooklyn. It will ultimately reach a height of 420 feet so it can lower the spindle joining the legs at 315 feet, which will be the center of the wheel.
This is an early rendering of the assembly of the legs. The large crane is doing the lifting, the small crane is doing the guiding.
The coming vertical pieces will be hard to ignore. The New York Wheel has a live cam on their site. Great fun to watch the action.