By Ula Ilnytzky
Associated Press

BROOKLYN -- The city has hosted two grand public art installations in the last three years: the saffron fabric Gates exhibit in Central Park in 2005 and the recent Waterfalls show near the shorelines of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Despite the controversy over the negative effect of the waterfall’s salty water on trees on the nearby Fulton Landing and the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, officials said the projects generated staggering amounts of money for New York. They said that The Gates brought in a whopping $254 million and 4 million visitors, and The Waterfalls generated $69 million and attracted an estimated 1.4 million visitors.

Impressive numbers — especially in tough economic times.

But how does the city come up with such detailed attendance and economic impact numbers for these privately funded projects that are free to the public? And how does it determine the projects' spillover benefits to hotels, restaurants, businesses and other cultural institutions?

It's a complex methodology that includes survey responses, ridership data from tour boats and mass transit, visitor head counts, hotel and restaurant bookings, retail and souvenir sales, and attendance rates at other cultural institutions.

Web sites also are analyzed to determine how many people are posting blog items and photos about the exhibits.

But some experts have questioned the accuracy of those numbers, saying that figures such as a quarter-billion dollars in economic impact for The Gates seems a little extreme.

"The thing about The Gates and The Waterfalls is that it's in the open air so it's difficult to assess how big the crowd is," said Cathy Lanier, a researcher at the Industrial and Labor Relations School at Cornell University.

She did not review the Economic Development Corp.'s 26-page report on the projects' affect on the local economy, but said the methodology was basically sound, based on a commonly used impact model.

Public art has become big business in New York in recent years. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has called public art "a signature of New York City" that inspires New Yorkers, helps bring in visitors, swells its coffers and burnishes the city's image as a world cultural destination.

The Economic Development Corp. said that The Waterfalls, by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, "demonstrated once again how public art makes New York one of the world's great places to live, work and visit."

After the 16-week show closed Oct. 13, Bloomberg said it had exceeded the city's expectations by $14 million.

"We've always understood that we have to encourage big, bold projects that set our city apart, and this will be increasingly important while areas of our economy are struggling from the turmoil on Wall Street," he said.

The four scaffoldlike waterfalls, 90 feet to 120 feet high, were visible along the shores of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Governor's Island. They were illuminated after sunset. The two Brooklyn waterfalls were under the Brooklyn Bridge and off the Brooklyn piers that will soon become part of Brooklyn Bridge Park.

The project's estimated $69 million included $15.5 million raised by the nonprofit Public Art Fund — which commissioned the project — to construct, operate and dismantle the falls.

Another $26.3 million came from "incremental visitor spending and the indirect economic impact of these expenditures," the EDC report said.

Visitor surveys at seven vantage locations found that 23 percent, or 320,000 people, who visited the Waterfalls were making their first foray to the Brooklyn or Lower Manhattan waterfronts. Of the 1.4 million visitors, some 79,000 people were out-of-town tourists who made the trip specifically to see the falls.

Over the past six years, the city has spent large sums to redevelop its once-neglected waterfront, and the exhibit was a high-profile way to showcase it and the surrounding neighborhoods as a destination.

The EDC also relied on Department of Transportation data, which estimated hundreds of thousands of "incidental sightings" of the Waterfalls by people who traveled daily by ferry, car, bicycle and subway on the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges and surrounding highways.

Ferry and boat tour operations created special Waterfalls cruises that provided some of the most exact numbers. For example, the Circle Line Downtown tours reported a total of 213,000 passengers on special daily Waterfalls cruise during the exhibition's run.

Economic impact information also was gleaned from various other events created around the Waterfalls. Hotels offered special overnight Waterfalls packages and vouchers, restaurants catered Waterfalls-themed dinners, walking tours combined culinary sites with Waterfalls views, and schools organized special Waterfalls outings.

Through visitor interviews and surveys, the city learned that 95 percent of all out-of-towners to the Waterfalls saw at least one other show, museum or cultural attraction during their stay. It also surmised that people from at least 55 countries saw the Waterfalls.

Indirect measures of the installation's success came from Web sites such as Flickr.com, which posted 6,000 Waterfalls photographs. There were also 1,200 blog postings and more than 200 YouTube videos of the falls.

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