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Looking beyond the ferris wheel itself, this idea that our public spaces are too precious for new and novel uses is really quite something.
I've got a horse in this race, so take this opinion with a grain of salt, but our recreational spaces have been evolving to accommodate our changing definitions of "amusement" since long before any of us were born.
If we look back at things like the Chutes, or Playland, or the pleasure gardens, they all embody this idea that people need a reprieve from daily life, and that we can dream up an infinite number of joyful ways to create that for our fellow San Franciscans.
It makes me sad that we give so much airtime to the detractors (looking at you, Chron) when there's so much space for all of these competing ideals to peacefully coexist. This is not a zero-sum game by any means.
We have so much space for birds, for tranquil natural areas, for darkness, for all of that. We're probably in the 99th percentile for experiencing those things in an urban environment. SF does an exceptional job of providing and protecting those things.
So to pretend that the Music Concourse—an area of the park that was created for the Midwinter Exposition—can't handle a few more years of a regular ol' ferris wheel is a bit disingenuous.
For the Midwinter Exposition, it took less than six months to create 120 structures in the park that were visited by over 2 million people, including a tower that was 100 feet taller than this wheel that had over 3000 lights on it.
Much of what we love about this part of the park is rooted in this singular event that overtook the area and made it an international attraction nearly overnight. Some of it (like the dreaded commercialization known as the Japanese Tea Garden) remains in place to this day.
Yet by some miracle, the birds and the tranquility of the park survived the fair, and they will probably continue to thrive no matter how much we get flustered by these oh-so-San-Francisco issues.
All that being said, the points raised about the generator and the price are good ones, and we would do well to figure out more equitable and environmental solutions. Both require money that no party has been willing to put up, and frankly, I think we've got bigger fish to fry.
I wish we could have substantive conversations on these issues rather than reducing this to a simple yes/no discussion about a wheel. We are dismissive of the past and doing a disservice to ourselves by indulging in these shallow interpretations of what a public space should be.
