Long Beach Aquarium’s Success Proves Skeptics Wrong

Defying skeptics and some heavy potential competition, builders of the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific have hit their attendance goal of 1.6 million visitors two months short of its first anniversary.

Visitors have endured long lines, waits of up to two hours and relatively hefty ticket prices to make the aquarium a success its first year.

But simply providing a tourist attraction and meeting the project’s hefty bond payments was never its primary goal.

City leaders who sold $117 million in bonds to build the aquarium hoped for far more: a draw that would spark tourism and lead the renewal of downtown, hit hard by the pullouts of the Navy and the Walt Disney Co., retail business failures and a general malaise.

These days, downtown Long Beach is hopping, with a new Rainbow Harbor, a rejuvenated Shoreline Village so busy its restaurants on occasion have run out of food, and three new high-end restaurants on Pine Avenue, which many attribute to the boost provided by the aquarium.

Downtown hotels are so busy that two new ones are planned, and even they probably won’t dent the need for more rooms, says Linda Howell DiMario of the Convention and Visitors Bureau. In February, the last month for which figures are available, hotel rooms citywide were 79% occupied, renting for an average of $97. Five years ago, rooms were only 48% occupied and took in an average of $59 a night.

Although she attributes a sharp rise in hotel occupancy to increased business and convention travel related to the economy, she said the aquarium is “a very positive influence.” Before the crowds started showing up, some wondered whether the aquarium would be another misguided waterfront tourist fiasco, like the Queen Mary and Spruce Goose.

The Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’ famous plane that was housed in a dome next to the Queen Mary, failed and is now long departed. The Queen Mary is operating in the black now, but went broke several times under various operators, including Disney.

Ever since the City Council approved the aquarium project in October 1994, then hurriedly broke ground in order to get the jump on potential competitors, the question hovering over the facility has been: Would it be another financially ruinous adventure in creating a tourist attraction?

Even though the aquarium hit its target attendance of 1.6 million in April, two months ahead of schedule, it will probably fall well short of the 2 million visitors some aquarium enthusiasts had hoped for, based on preliminary projections by some analysts. Executives hope to finish the year with 1.8 million visitors.

Based on 1998 attendance figures, that might be good enough to place the Long Beach Aquarium third nationally among nonprofit aquariums, after the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, which drew just under 2 million in 1998, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Northern California, which registered nearly 1.9 million visitors last year.

The Aquarium of the Pacific is so successful that two potentially strong Los Angeles competitors, the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in neighboring San Pedro and the California Science Center in Exposition Park, both of which had been planning new aquariums of their own in the mid-1990s, have gone back to the drawing boards. Plans for others, in Ventura County and Santa Barbara, have been either delayed or dropped.

“When the plan was adopted, we didn’t know how to do an aquarium, how to pay for it, or how to design it,” said Bob Paternoster of Long Beach’s Queensway Bay Project, a waterfront redevelopment plan built around the aquarium. “We did a full court press because we wanted to be first. We thought if we built the biggest and best and got it up first we’d kill the competition. We succeeded.”

What seemed like such intense competition at one point in 1995 has now settled into a relaxed relationship between the Long Beach, San Pedro and Exposition Park facilities.

The Cabrillo Marine Aquarium still plans an expansion, but Cabrillo director Susanne Lawrenz-Miller said it would be on a much smaller scale, focused on research and education.

Opening of the Long Beach Aquarium “seemed to have a positive effect on us,” she said.

“At a time when they were being swamped with visitors,” Lawrenz-Miller said, “we had some people who saw the long lines over there and decided to come over here rather than wait.”

Acceptance by peers delights Warren J. Iliff, chief executive officer of the aquarium.

A longtime zoo and aquarium director, Iliff is struggling to overcome the perception among marine biologists that he is running Aquarium Lite, a crowd pleaser rather than a serious research institution, like Monterey.

“There is no denying that the original reason for the aquarium was as part of the redevelopment of the downtown area,” he said. “The problem with that is it probably discounts what our mission is as an institution.”

With the turnstiles continuing to turn at a healthy rate, the aquarium will be challenged to maintain its attendance next year. National experts say aquariums traditionally taper off the second and third years they are open before attendance levels off.

Iliff said an increasing emphasis will be placed on the aquarium as an educational and research institution. Among its proudest accomplishments is its success in growing live sea coral.

Marine biologist Sylvia Earle, a world-famous diver and explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society, said the aquarium fills an important niche just the way it is.

One day recently, with long lines of schoolchildren ogling some of the 10,000 fish in the aquarium’s tanks, Earle said it is very important to have such a showplace in proximity to the inner city.

“It is so important for Los Angeles and Long Beach to have a world-class aquarium,” she said. “This is a great place for people who are not likely to get out to distant places in the ocean to meet creatures who are there.”