A 625-foot-tall, $230 million New York Wheel will be built on Staten Island overlooking the Statue of Liberty and the downtown Manhattan skyline. 1,440 passengers at a time will ride through the sky and get a varying NYC view. The developers hope to take about 5M folks a year on this ride.

After the 1,063′ Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 Paris Exhibition, tall was in vogue. So George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. designed and built his 264′ observation wheel for the 1893 Chicago Exhibition. As a Pittsburgh engineer and bridge builder, Ferris understood how to use the 71 tons of steel to make the structure safe. The wonderful photo below gives a sense of the structure.

Today the Singapore Flyer, at 541′ and shown below, holds the record for world’s largest Ferris Wheel. It’s about 98′ taller than the London Eye.

The free ferry to Staten Island currently carries about 2M visitors a year, but there isn’t much to do on the island after the free ferry ride. This big ferris wheel aims to change that.

The $230M project will be all privately funded, in fact they plan to pay Staten Island $2.5M per year rent. As Staten Island Live reports:

But there’s much more to this project than just the New York Wheel. The mayor also announced that BFC Partners will build Harbor Commons, a 420,000-square-foot retail complex adjacent to the Wheel and ballpark. It will house up to 75 designer outlet stores and a 120,000-square-foot hotel, with a 15,000-square-foot banquet facility.

The fact that this project is actively being planned should provide some optimism for anyone in the construction business. When developers start getting rammy and proposing big projects, recoveries follow.