Five Challenges Facing Chicago’s Skyline
Chicago doesn’t have an iconic tourist attraction. There’s no giant Ferris wheel, no observation tower, no famous bridge. Entrepreneurs Lou Raizin and Laurence Geller want to change that with a gondola. Over the past four years, the men studied more than fifty signature attractions in cities around the globe and came up with the Skyline as an iconic attraction for the Windy City. As presented to the City Club of Chicago on May 3rd, the plan includes a gondola from Navy Pier with multiple stops along the Chicago Riverfront. David Marks, the architect behind the London Eye, collaborated on the innovative design with New York-based Davis Brody Bond. Marks also designed the British Airways i360 observation tower with a passenger capsule built by Poma and Sigma. The Skyline project would likely bring together the same team from the Eye and i360 with engineering firm Jacobs Inc. and ropeway technology from Leitner-Poma.
Mr. Raizin and Mr. Geller say they’ve spent millions designing and studying the Skyline, which will cost an estimated $250 million raised from private investors. The premise is sound but the proposal comes with significant challenges.
1. What is it?
“This is not your typical aerial gondola,” Mr. Geller told the City Club. The system would transport 3,000 visitors per hour at 800 feet a minute. That’s pretty standard for a monocable gondola. The challenge is architects want big, beautiful cabins while also keeping a “light footprint” for the system. Renderings show approximately 25-passenger cabins with only one haul rope and no grips. To date, the largest monocable gondolas in the world carry 15 passengers, not 25. Larger cabins require track ropes, bigger terminals and complex towers with saddles.
News Roundup: Dramatic
- Leitner Ropeways publishes its Annual Report for 2015.
- Peak Resorts discontinues dividend for shareholders in continuing effort to save cash with $118 million in liabilities.
- Whaleback nonprofit decides a surface lift is key to the New Hampshire mountain’s future.
- Val Neigette, Quebec seized by creditors.
- Big SNOW America inches closer to opening.
- The Roosevelt Island Tramway turned 40 yesterday.
- The Hermitage Club at Haystack Mountain is up to 875 members and $114 million in assets. American Skiing Company sold the property in 2005 for a mere $5 million.
- Wynn Resorts’ $4.1 billion casino in Macau will have a Doppelmayr gondola that runs in a rectangle.
Instagram Tuesday: Splicing
East River Skyway Envisions 3S Gondolas for New York
This week’s New Yorker features real estate website CEO Daniel Levy, who hatched a plan to bring gondolas to the Big Apple while on vacation in Chamonix in 2014. His private venture, dubbed East River Skyway, envisions a trio of 3S gondolas with up to 12 stations connecting points along the East River with landmarks in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. Levy has retained the Canadian firm behind The Gondola Project, Creative Urban Projects Inc., as consultants for the proposal.
Working in East River Skyway’s favor is the fact that New York’s M.T.A. is finalizing plans to shut down a section of the L train subway for a year and a half or drastically reduce service for twice as long. The L train’s tunnel that shuttles 225,000 daily commuters under the East River sustained damaged during Hurricane Sandy and needs up to a billion dollars in repairs.
Cascade Mountain Announces $9 Million Expansion with 2 New Lifts
Cascade Mountain will get two new Leitner-Poma quad chairs this summer with more new lifts on the way, the resort announced today. This summer’s $9 million slate of improvements includes a high speed quad replacement for the Cindy Pop chair, a new quad serving seven new trails, an expanded base lodge and snowmaking improvements.
Cascade Mountain became the first ski area in Wisconsin with a high-speed lift back in 1998 and has eight lifts including three quad chairs. The new Cindy Pop Express will be nearly twice as long as the 1991 Borvig quad chair it replaces and will move 2,400 skiers per hour. The new “Lift C” will be a fixed-grip quad east of the current ski area serving new terrain. Cascade owners Rob and Vicki Walz are excited to move forward with the expansion that’s been years in the making. “My dad always envisioned using the far east side of Cascade for an expansion and he started cutting trails many years ago. The time has come to reach the next level for Cascade. Our customers will appreciate the new intermediate trails which are longer than what we have on the west side,” commented Rob Walz in the announcement on the resort’s website.
The Case for a 3S Gondola to Timberline
Timberline Lodge & Ski Area is perhaps America’s most unique snowsports destination with year-round skiing on one of the Lower 48’s largest volcanoes. Operated for the last fifty years by RLK & Company on behalf of the U.S. Forest Service, Timberline offers lift-served skiing twelve months a year on 1,400 acres of Mt. Hood. Two million people visit the Lodge and ski area annually which are under 60 miles from Portland, the tenth fastest-growing city in America. Timberline’s ski operation expanded in 2007 to accommodate growing numbers of visitors by adding the Jeff Flood Express in Still Creek Basin. The ski area now has seven lifts with a vertical rise of 3,690 feet, the largest in the Pacific Northwest.
Timberline is also unique in that much of its terrain lies below the Lodge and access road. Visitors drive halfway up the mountain just to leave their car and ski below. Although the mountain offers more alternative transportation options than ever, Timberline’s two-lane access road and relatively small parking lots remain woefully inadequate. Building more parking at 6,000 feet within a National Historic Landmark is not consistent with RLK’s sustainability goals nor those of the Oregon Department of Transportation and U.S. Forest Service to minimize development around the historic lodge.
News Roundup: Skyline
- Two men want to build an iconic gondola called Skyline along the Chicago Riverfront.
- Sandia Peak unveils new tram cabins for its 50th anniversary.
- Sugarloaf updates the public on its summer lift maintenance projects.
- BMF wins contract for its first 10-passenger gondola to be built next year in Switzerland.
- The owner of Gletscherjet 3+4 built last summer in Austria say it has already carried 3 million passengers, believed to be a record for a winter lift. The system is an 8/10 combination lift interlining with a 10-passenger gondola.
- Poma’s 2015 Reference Book is now online highlighting last year’s projects from around the world.
- Are Vail Resorts and Powdr Corp. bidding on Eldora?
- A New Zealand developer will test whether a Whistler-style bike park with its own high speed quad can stand alone without skiing.
- Doppelmayr and its contractors take responsibility for a construction accident at one of the terminals under construction in La Paz that injured ten people on Saturday.
Instagram Tuesday: Mexicable
In His Own Words: Carl Skylling of Skytrac on the Leitner-Poma Acquisition
Last week on my way home from the Rocky Mountain Lift Association conference, I stopped by Skytrac headquarters to sit down with Carl Skylling, General Manager of the company that’s shaken up the lift-building industry in North America over the past eight years. If you hadn’t heard, Leitner-Poma bought Skytrac two weeks ago in a move that surprised many. Carl is an industry veteran who worked his way up through Garaventa CTEC, Doppelmayr CTEC and Skytrac in construction, operations and management positions. In addition to kindly agreeing to be interviewed, Carl introduced me to some of the hard-working men and women who design and build Skytrac lifts in Salt Lake City.
Peter: How did you get started with SkyTrac?
Carl: I started out with Garaventa CTEC and then got pulled into the merger with Garaventa and Doppelmayr, becoming Doppelmayr CTEC. Jan Leonard had stepped down in 2008 and by 2010 I was Vice President of Operations but getting restless to do something different.
I approached these guys with a concept I had to continue this whole idea of doing service work and modification work because I saw that there was a big niche in the market that was missing there. So I approached Dave Metivier and Alan Hepner, and about the same time Jan Leonard was also getting interested in finding a way to take care of his former customer base by supporting them with service and parts. So there was this huge potential market to make all those parts.
One thing kind of led to another between [Jan] and I approaching our partners, Dave and Alan, who were running Hilltrac and Skytrac at the time. We ended up taking this Skytrac concept to the point where, with the four of us, we realized why stop with parts? Why not do a design of our own. SkyTrac started in 2008 doing some engineering/modification work with Dave and Alan but we really, in 2010, took it to the next level.
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