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Carousel At The Battery Will Give Riders A Fish-Eye View
“The carousel is going to be such a wonderful addition to the Battery,” said Battery Conservancy president Warrie Price. “This is going to make the Battery.” Located near Castle Clinton on the site of the country’s first aquarium (built in 1896), the carousel, designed by the Downtown firm of weisz + yoes, will look like a glass and steel nautilus shell, doubling as an entertaining ride and a sculpture of glass and light. (To stay in good working order, the carousel will operate all year.) The aquarium-themed interior will be created by George Tsypin, who designed the sets for the Broadway adaptation of Disney’s “The Little Mermaid.” Instead of the usual carousel horses, passengers will choose one of 30 different fish, each cast in resin and coated with a polymer to reflect a full spectrum of colors. All but three of the fish will be single-seaters. In the original conception of the carousel, visitors would ride fish as they would horses, but Tsypin wanted riders to feel like they are swimming themselves. In the current design, they will ride inside the fish. “It’s going to be a lit moving sculpture in the middle of the park,” Price said. “At night it’s going to look amazing.” To make the most of its nighttime lighting effects, the carousel will stay open until 10 p.m. As the two-and-a-half-minute ride begins, the carousel’s outer glass wall will darken to a deep blue, and movie footage of underwater scenes will be projected onto the interior. The fish, mounted on a quadruple turntable composed of three smaller discs spinning inside a larger 60-foot-diameter plate, will rise and fall to simulate the three-dimensionality of underwater navigation. Price is talking to deep-sea explorer Edie Widder about transmitting live footage to the carousel from her Eye in the Sea, the ocean-floor observation center that she invented. At other times, films about specific underwater species might be projected on the screens. Price said one of the goals of the carousel is to make people more aware that the water that surrounds the city is filled with life. “We’ve been trying to figure out: how do we combine amusement and education and advocacy and conservation?” she said. “We want it to be fun, but we also want to get kids thinking.” The revolutionary design and cutting-edge technology won’t come cheap, of course. Price said the Battery Conservancy has raised $8 million in public money and another $3.5 million in private funds for the design and construction of the carousel. Along with the children’s playground next door, designed by Frank Gehry, Price said she expects the carousel to be one of the final pieces in the long rehabilitation of the park. “This is a place with so much historical significance, but for so long it was just a place that commuters walked through, not a place we fell in love with,” she said. “It didn’t reflect anything about who we are as New Yorkers, our creativity. This is going to get us to a point where the Battery is a real destination.”
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