Cities Across U.S. Float Economic Ventures That Pay Off: Aquariums : Trends: Oregon facility is one of four to open this year. It gives a boost to a region where logging and salmon industries are in decline.

This is the spawning of the Age of Aquariums.

From blighted East Coast waterfronts to the salmon-starved coast of Oregon, marine museums that mix family entertainment with environmental education are becoming anchors of economic development.

“People don’t go bowling. They like to go to aquariums these days,” said Jim Peterson, president of Bios Inc. in Seattle, which designs museum exhibits.

Aquariums opened this year in Chattanooga, Tenn.; Corpus Christi, Tex.; Camden, N.J., and Newport. The $14.5-million Oregon Coast Aquarium is the latest to fill its fish tanks, turn on its wave machines and watch the river of people flow in.

Within the last two years, the National Aquarium in Baltimore built a dolphin pavilion and the venerable John G. Shedd Aquarium in Chicago doubled its size. The landmark Monterey Bay Aquarium is planning a $60-million expansion.

New aquariums are planned in Tampa, Fla.; Cleveland and Charleston, S.C. Others are being considered in Duluth, Minn., and Buffalo, N.Y.

“Anywhere you can give people a lot of fun in a family context, provide a colorful entertainment experience along with a little education, it’s something to think about if you are one of the town fathers,” said Harrison Price of Torrance, who does feasibility studies for museums and theme parks.

If you build an aquarium, they will come.

They come because their interest in the marine environment has been piqued by Jacques Cousteau TV specials, and they want to see fish up close and personal. They come because new technology lets aquariums be more like Disneyland and less like Davy Jones’ locker.

But environmentalism and entertainment have not been first and foremost in the minds of many aquarium advocates. These civic officials see tanks and fish as building blocks for urban renewal.

It all started in 1981 with the National Aquarium in Baltimore, the centerpiece of a massive redevelopment of the city’s blighted waterfront.

“The extraordinary success of Baltimore was the trigger,” setting off an aquarium boom that is comparable to the growth of theme parks triggered by Disneyland, Price said.

In Newport, the idea was to boost tourism after environmental constraints depressed logging and salmon fishing declined.

New Jersey’s poorest city, Camden, turned to a $52-million aquarium after watching its industrial base ebb after World War II. The nation’s first major freshwater aquarium, in Chattanooga, is a $45-million keystone to a revitalized Tennessee River front.

The 2-year-old Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans attracted 2.2 million visitors last year, Price said, and together the top nine aquariums drew 9 million. The lure of the sea is even stronger in Japan, where the new aquarium in Osaka pulled in 5.5 million.

Price said those are near “Disneyland-style numbers.”

Showman P.T. Barnum recognized people’s fascination with creatures of the deep when he opened one of the nation’s first aquariums in 1861, said Leighton Taylor, author of the upcoming book on aquariums “Windows on Nature.”

“There is something like a sense of communion, the church kind of union, when people make eye contact with an animal, even if it is an octopus or a sea urchin,” he said.

Novelist Ken Kesey read his children’s story “The Sea Lion” for the Memorial Day weekend opening of the Oregon Coast Aquarium. He finds people are tired of craning their necks at the space shuttle and are getting excited about what lies under the surface of the ocean.

“I believe we’ve been led astray by looking up. All we do is bump into stuff,” Kesey said.

“There’s an old quote from Thoreau, which is, ‘In wildness is the preservation of the world.’ About the only wildness left is in the sea. It’s always been such a romantic fantasy, from Jules Verne to Melville to Conrad.

“There’s something about the ocean that puts you in your place. We need to be put in our place,” Kesey said.

Peterson is less lyrical.

“Major cities have seen a decrease in the ability to run out into the countryside,” he said. “We all thought we could drive out and find a river someplace, but guess what? They’re all fenced off and full of rusting car bodies.”

The new aquariums serve as an escape from the despoiled Earth, and a reminder of it. “The new kind of aquarium . . . admits that the reason we have aquariums is not to celebrate human domination of nature, but recognizes that we all have to learn about it, to respect it and save it,” Taylor said.

When the Monterey Bay Aquarium opened in 1984, it became the modern prototype. Designers threw out the Victorian idea of building a civic monument stacked full of water-filled boxes of exotic species and focused on local waters.

When Seattle architect Fulton Gale began designing the Oregon Coast Aquarium, he approached it as if it were a movie. During a design retreat, he hung storyboards on the side of a cottage describing the journey of a raindrop as it falls in the forest, seeps into a river, flows through an estuary into Yaquina Bay and finally becomes part of the Pacific Ocean.

“Entertainment happens also to be educational,” Gale said.

Visitors cross a creek by a beaver dam to enter. They are directed by fiberglass coho salmon hanging from the ceiling to a bank of 16 televisions, which alternately combine to form one image and break up into individual shots to tell the story of the raindrop.

Gale turned the traditional aquarium inside out.

People walk through an outdoor aviary filled with colorful tufted puffins, rhinoceros auklets, pigeon guillemots and common murres.

Visitors duck under a rocky ledge to watch seals and sea lions swim underwater.

Children drop on their hands and knees to peer into tide pools. Mothers pushing strollers wheel into a grotto to watch an octopus.

Among the indoor exhibits, a remote-controlled video camera lets children raised on Nintendo zoom in on a tide pool filled with chalk-lined dironas, orange cup coral, line chitons, shag rug nudibranches and California mussels.

Three-quarters of the aquarium is behind the scenes, keeping alive 2,000 specimens representing 150 species, not counting barnacles and limpets, said Allen Monroe, director of animal husbandry.

Two 1,500-gallon tanks dump their loads to create waves to wash through tide pools.

Saltwater is life to sea creatures, and old aquariums constantly dealt with corrosion. No more.

“Since 1974 or 1975, the huge increase in the availability of plastic piping, slotted pipe, fiberglass grids and gratings, fiberglass structural angles and non-corrosive pumps have come out of the petrochemical industry,” Peterson said. “All of a sudden we have these non-rusting aquariums.”

Acrylic plastics allow huge picture windows rather than little portholes of glass, Taylor said.

For the kind of realism people expect in movies, Gale took molds from nearby rocky cliffs to build the outdoor exhibits.

“We very much believe in capturing people in a natural habitat,” Gale said. “You can’t do that by putting your thumb up in the air and saying, ‘That’s about right.’ ”

It worked for two 13-year-olds, Chad Martin and Nathan Kiser, on a field trip from McMinnville Middle School.

“It looks just real and natural,” Chad said as he watched puffins fly underwater and strut on a cliff ledge sculpted so they won’t wear out their wings.

“You don’t have much chance to see things like this,” Nathan agreed.