The Staten Island Wheel Never Spun, and Its Footings Are About to Become Permanent

"There's nothing that tastes quite as good as that first Friday night beer on the way home," City Council Member Frank Morano said this past March, describing the return of onboard alcohol sales to the Staten Island Ferry after a gap that stretched back to 2019. It read like a throwaway line. It wasn't. That one change was the first domino in a run of small operational shifts that have turned the St. George waterfront into something closer to a functioning leisure district this September than it has been in years.

The ferry now sells beer, hard seltzers, and canned cocktails again as of March 27, a service that touches roughly 45,000 riders on an average weekday and more than 16 million annually. Empire Beer Garden, the largest restaurant and bar inside Empire Outlets, reopened under new ownership that same spring with an outdoor space built around Manhattan skyline views. Neither of these facts is dramatic on its own. Together, they explain why a Saturday on this waterfront now looks different than it did three years ago.

But the detail that actually reframes the neighborhood isn't the beer. It's what the city just decided to do with a hole in the ground that has sat unfinished since 2018.

The Wheel Everyone Expected to Disappear

The New York Wheel was supposed to be the borough's Ferris wheel answer to the London Eye, a 630-foot observation structure first announced in 2012. Construction actually started. Then investors pulled out and work stopped in September 2018, leaving four slanted concrete footings standing in a fenced lot next to Empire Outlets, visible from the ferry, the ballpark, and half of St. George. For seven years, that lot has been shorthand among residents for the neighborhood's biggest unfinished promise.

Most people assumed the eventual fix would be simple: tear it down, pour a new foundation, start over. The renderings released by the city's Economic Development Corporation in November 2025 say otherwise. The plan, designed by FXCollaborative, keeps the four Wheel footings in place and builds the new waterfront esplanade around them rather than removing them.

That's an unusual choice. Redevelopment projects almost always clear the evidence of what failed before building what comes next. Here, the failure becomes a permanent, load-bearing part of the design, a literal skeleton left standing inside a park that's supposed to represent the neighborhood moving forward.

The rest of the public process is still ahead:

• Environmental review begins in the first half of 2026
• ULURP, the city's land use review procedure, is expected to start in the second half of 2026
• The Tompkinsville Esplanade's first phase is set to finish in spring 2028
• The reimagined Pier 1 and the new esplanade fronting the old Wheel site are both targeted for summer 2028

None of that is fast. But the decision about the footings is already made, which means the empty lot everyone has been walking past for seven years isn't a placeholder anymore. It's the future park, mid-construction.

This Month on the Waterfront

While the long-range planning grinds through city review, the calendar right around St. George is unusually full this week and next.

Pig Island alone draws more than 20 chefs and pitmasters onto Snug Harbor's 83-acre grounds for an afternoon of whole-hog roasts, Caribbean and Puerto Rican barbecue traditions, and a stretch organizers call Hot Sauce Alley. It's not a pop-up. This is its 17th consecutive year on Staten Island, which makes it one of the more established food events on the North Shore rather than a one-off.

Three shows in three weeks at the St. George Theatre is also more concert density than the venue usually stacks into a single month, and it lands right as the FerryHawks are still hosting home games a few blocks away. For a neighborhood that spends most of the year absorbing commuters rather than entertaining them, that's a lot happening within walking distance of the ferry terminal at once.

A Ballpark Built for More Than Baseball

SIUH Community Park, still known to longtime residents by its old name, Richmond County Bank Ballpark, holds 7,171 seats, making it the largest stadium in the Atlantic League. It hosts the FerryHawks, but also Wagner College's baseball team and NYU's. A $5 million round of upgrades installed synthetic turf and reconfigured the field so it could also host rugby and soccer alongside baseball, work that was finished by the time the park took on its current name in 2022.

That detail matters more than it sounds. A ballpark that only works for baseball six months a year is a seasonal amenity. A ballpark reconfigured to host multiple sports year-round is civic infrastructure, the same category of investment as the esplanade and the ferry route reconfiguration the city has planned to eventually connect St. George to Brooklyn and Wall Street.

Put together, the ballpark upgrades, the ferry service changes, and the esplanade plan all point the same direction: toward a waterfront designed to hold activity in every season, not just summer.

What This Actually Changes

None of this is really about a Ferris wheel. It's about what a neighborhood chooses to keep visible while it rebuilds itself. St. George could have buried its most public failure under a fresh foundation and called it progress. Instead, the four footings that never held up a working wheel are going to hold up a walking path instead, in full view of everyone getting off the ferry.

That's worth knowing the next time you're walking past that fenced lot on your way to a FerryHawks game or a Friday night show at the Theatre. The wheel never spun. Its footings are about to become one of the more literal you-can't-erase-this design decisions on the entire North Shore, right as everything built around it starts working the way it was supposed to.

If you're weighing what any of this means for property here, on the North Shore or elsewhere across Staten Island, Jillian Abbadessa Real Estate tracks these changes as part of how she prices and positions homes in this market. Let's Connect.