How many attractions for downtown Atlanta?

How about flooding the railroad tracks in the area called “The Gulch” to create a water feature? Or a casino at Underground Atlanta? And isn't downtown Atlanta missing a pirate museum?

Some of the ideas that have been floated for downtown have often seemed starry-eyed.

Perhaps the biggest and wackiest idea of all also proved the most visionary. When Atlanta hosted the 1996 Olympic Games, it showed that dreaming big can pay off.

One of downtown’s most popular attractions, the Georgia Aquarium, was certainly an “if they build it, will they come” exercise. For Georgia Aquarium benefactor Bernie Marcus, a founder of Home Depot, his vision has been remarkable. He’s adding a $110 million dolphin museum to his $290 million aquarium that has been attracting over 2 million people a year.

This week, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Marcus is helping the proponents of a $200 million, 45-story “observation wheel,” an eye in the sky in downtown Atlanta similar to the London Eye. The team that built the London wheel, that became Great Britain’s most visited attraction, thinks it could have similar success here.

To a great extent, the success of the aquarium and the new nearby World of Coca-Cola has brought new scrutiny to the area around Centennial Olympic Park, attracting others who want to test if their ideas will succeed there too.

Several attractions are planning their debuts there: the College Football Hall of Fame, the Center for Civil and Human Rights, a national healthcare museum and a pirate museum.

Also coming soon: A streetcar to connect the park with the historic Sweet Auburn district.

The rising question is whether too many disparate ideas create a mish-mash that confuse the image of downtown Atlanta and may not actually create ticket sales for all.

A.J. Robinson, president of Central Atlanta Progress, doesn’t worry about that. He feels that the ideas will be regulated by market demand.

“We’ve seen I can’t tell you how many unrealistic ideas for downtown,” said Robinson. “Everything from building a lake in ‘The Gulch’ and some type of gondola ride from one side of downtown to the other. People have good imaginations.”

In the end, the public’s demand determines what sticks.

“The marketplace is the ultimate evaluator if something’s good or bad," he said. "You can’t raise money for a bad idea. I’m not worried we’ll have too much of an amusement park atmosphere here.”

It’s the job of William Pate and the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau to sell Atlanta’s attractions to tourists and conventioneers. He also said he’s not worried about marketing the diverse attractions.

“No more than I could be concerned about selling a restaurant strip with a Pakistani restaurant, an Italian restaurant and a continental restaurant,” he said. “I think people want a diversity of offerings and they’ll make the choices. One thing you could say about Atlanta is we never rest on our laurels.”

Many cities, he added, would love to get just one of the attractions that Atlanta has or soon will get. The attractions around Centennial Olympic Park become a starting point and, he hopes, will create longer stays by tourists, conventioneers and business people.

“I want more people to come today than came yesterday,” he said. “People are seeing a lot of exciting things happening in Atlanta. What you really want at the end of the day is to have momentum.”

Still, not everything sticks.

The National Museum of Patriotism that opened near the Georgia Aquarium in February 2009 closed after just a year and half.

Bob Hope, president and co-owner of public relations firm Hope-Beckham, remembers how the World of Sid and Marty Krofft, an indoor amusement park, opened in the Omni in the 1970s. It closed after a few months, Hope said.

“Thank God for unanswered prayers,” he said. “Sometimes you’re better off.”

Opening an attraction is a trial and error process for what the public likes, he said. Sometimes you don’t know if people will come until you build it.

It happens in other cities too, even places that seem foolproof.

The Sports Museum of America that opened in Manhattan in 2008 closed after less than a year. The museum didn’t attract as many visitors as expected and cost overruns hamstrung its operations.

The NASCAR Hall of Fame that Atlanta fought so hard for hasn’t been the boon Charlotte hoped for. Ticket sales at the nearly $200 million attraction, which  opened in May, are already lagging. It had only 73,000 paid visitors in the third quarter, according to The Charlotte Observer. Initial projections called for 800,000 in a year.

The Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority tapped a $3.4 million reserve fund to cover the losses at the attraction and will have to do so again if the hall runs another deficit, the Observer reported.

“I think it’s the greatest thing that never happened to Atlanta,” Hope said.

Still, some wonder if an eclectic mix of attractions is the right for downtown Atlanta.

“Believe it or not, there is an overall plan for downtown,” said CAP’s Robinson. “We had a tremendous run-up of development from 2004 to 2008 with the aquarium, World of Coke, Centennial Hill [Ivan Allen Plaza], GSU expansions and Auburn Avenue. In the last two weeks, people are beginning to see some of the fruits of a lot of years of labor.”

CAP's plan for the center city, called Imagine Downtown, was revised recently to include the Green Line plan that would link the area around the state Capitol to the area around the Gulch. Both plans revealed that people wanted a more walkable downtown, Robinson said.

CAP also has noted a slight influx in residents downtown. CAP data shows the downtown residential population was 25,800 in 2005. The group believes it will be over 30,000 by the end of 2010.

The aquarium, in the meantime, created momentum around Centennial Olympic Park.

“The aquarium really launched the ability for folks who wanted to propose other attractions to look at downtown in a different way. The Center for Civil and Human Rights, College Football Hall of Fame, NASCAR museum and World of Coke all came after that,” said Robinson.

In the end, he said, clustering attractions makes a lot of sense.

“Years ago, we had very spread out attractions. You had to get in your car to get to the Atlanta History Center, the High Museum and Stone Mountain,” said Robinson.

While that is still true, there are more attractions clustered downtown, serving as to be a jumping off point to see other things, ACVB’s Pate said.

“I’m a big believer in throwing everything up there on the wall to see what sticks,” said Catherine Ross, a professor of architecture at Georgia Tech and director of the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development. “Some of these things are very novel and trivial and they don’t last long. The question is: what sticks.”

Usually, she said, it’s the attractions that express best “who we are and connect with the other characteristics of our city and our place.”

Businessman Dick Lea sure hopes that his museum, dedicated to the artifacts of pirates, will become one of those attractions.

He still is planning and raising money for a $6 million, 20,000-square-foot museum on Ivan Allen Boulevard that would include a “buccaneer barbecue restaurant,” gift shop, pirate ship replica and a sophisticated arcade with virtual reality games.

“There’s a difference between having a museum and having an attraction,” he said. “When I started out, I wanted to do a museum. I perhaps over-intellectualized what the market might be. The whole thing is to see what the market can stand.”