Atlanta gets a Fish Aquarium

[THE KOD]

Bernie Marcus makes mark with Georgia Aquarium
Home Depot magnate has generous vision of education, downtown revival

By JIM THARPE

Published on: 05/29/05
He was out of work at 49, a billionaire a decade or so later.

A hard-charging visionary, he is accustomed to doing things on a grand scale and getting his way, even when skeptics sneer. And his way, these days, means opening one of the biggest and best-stocked fish tanks on the planet.

Moses parted the sea, but it took a bigger-than-life character like Bernie Marcus to bring the ocean and its creatures to North Georgia.

The 76-year-old Home Depot co-founder is dropping $200 million of his personal fortune on the biggest indoor aquarium in the United States. The Georgia Aquarium, rising like a colossal, landlocked ocean liner in downtown Atlanta near Centennial Olympic Park, is scheduled to open Nov. 23.

"I wanted something unique, something that would last for generations," Marcus said.

People have learned not to doubt the up-from-nothing billionaire, whom nearly everyone calls "Bernie." Three decades back, many retail gurus chuckled as Marcus, Arthur Blank and financier Ken Langone built hardware stores the size of twin football fields, changing the face of retailing.

"Bernie thinks big," said U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), who has known Marcus since the early Home Depot days. "A lot of people think big, but they are just visionaries and not doers. Bernie not only has the vision, he can do the hard work to make the vision become a reality."

Marcus, a trim 6 feet 2 and 180 pounds, exudes the bounce and enthusiasm of a man decades his junior. He lifts light weights. He walks every day. He plays a rotten round of golf (he shoots in the 90s). "I'm never going to be better, and that's the way it is," he says.

He traces his love of aquariums to his globe-trotting Home Depot days. If there were a few hours of downtime, Marcus often would wander the cool, calming hallways of huge fish tanks from Chicago to Monterey Bay to Japan.

He remembers one transcendent moment at a Japanese aquarium with a giant grouper, a fish that most people encounter only at the end of a fork.

"The grouper must have been about 1,000 pounds," Marcus said. "I never saw a fish that big in my life. He just stood there and looked at me. I never realized how ferocious these fish are."

He is quick with a quip and has a warm, grandfatherly disposition that can turn icy when anyone pries too deeply into his still-under-wraps aquarium. Contractors and employees have signed confidentiality agreements. Lawyers have been ordered to keep portions of blueprints filed with the city's Building Department under wraps.

During his Home Depot days, Marcus had a saying: Don't advertise the hammer until the hammer is on the shelf. His approach to the Georgia Aquarium has been much the same. It will combine entertainment, education and research, and it will be huge, and that's about all he'll say.

"It's like a Broadway play opening," Marcus said. "They don't give excerpts to a Broadway play six months in advance. They don't tell you the plot line."

Marcus' largess could have enormous consequences for the region's tourism economy. One study predicts the aquarium and the new World of Coke museum could pump $255 million into state and local tax coffers over 15 years and create as many as 3,300 jobs.

One thing is certain: The sheer heft of the $200 million gift will thrust Marcus' name into the rarified ranks of Atlanta benefactors like Robert Woodruff and Ted Turner.

"I think he's a guy who's truly philanthropic in his heart," Gov. Sonny Perdue said. "It's reflected in many gifts, but certainly this facility."

The Chronicle of Philanthropy earlier this year listed Marcus and his wife, Billi, among the top charitable donors in the nation, based on their funding of the aquarium.

Last week, Marcus beamed when 600 of Atlanta's top business and civil leaders gave him a standing ovation as he accepted the Salvation Army's highest honor, the Others Award, at a posh Buckhead luncheon. The award honors individuals who exemplify an extraordinary spirit of service.

As the applause died down and Marcus stepped to the podium, the scrawny kid from New Jersey was 700 miles, eight decades and a few billion dollars from where his improbable life began.

 

[THE KOD]

Growing up

He grew up the son of struggling Jewish immigrants who fled persecution in Russia only to land in a fourth-floor Newark tenement. Marcus remembers an early life surrounded by a supportive, loving family that instilled a sense of hard work and charity.

"My mother used to call it the golden land in Yiddish," Marcus said. "We had cockroaches. We had mice. But this was heaven to them compared to what they came from."

The man who would one day oversee a home improvement empire showed little ability with tools when he helped his father, a cabinetmaker who worked 15-hour days to put food on the table for his wife and four children.

"I would try to help him build these things, and he would take out every nail I put in," Marcus said. "My father was a perfectionist, and I couldn't satisfy him."

His mother pushed him to get a pharmacy degree from Rutgers University when he could not get into medical school. Her sense of charitable giving follows him to this day. She would often take money put aside for the children's snacks, he said, and give it to the less fortunate.

"She had this Jewish word, besheret, which means, 'It's destined,' " Marcus said. "Some people read it as destined to be a disaster. With my mother, it was destined to be good. If somebody died my mother could find something good in it. You know, 'He's not suffering anymore. The family couldn't deal with any more.' Pretty soon, you would say, 'Thank God, the guy died.' She would convince you that dying had its benefits."

Marcus tried being a druggist, but he gravitated toward the business end of things.

"I love retailing," he said. "I love dealing with customers. I love dealing with the psyches of customers. I don't like the financial end of the business. I never did."

He worked a series of retail jobs, eventually landing as a top executive with Handy Dan Improvement Centers, a successful chain of Los Angeles-based hardware stores.

Marcus' meteoric rise began when he and Blank were fired in 1978 after a run-in with their boss.

"Bernie got whacked, and I got whacked at the same time," Blank said during a recent interview.

Langone said Marcus, who had helped build Handy Dan, struggled to make sense of being cast to the sidewalk in middle age.

"He had a family. He had no money. Down. I don't know how much lower you could be," Langone said.

A flamboyant New York investment banker who speaks with an Italian brogue, Langone reminded Marcus of the what-if chats they'd had, the ones where Marcus sketched out his vision for a chain of home improvement stores, bigger and cheaper than anything that existed.

The two met when Marcus worked for Handy Dan and Langone represented a group of investors interested in buying the company.

"I said, 'You've been kicked in the ass with a golden horseshoe,' " Langone recalled. "He said, 'What do you mean?' I said, 'You know that thing you've been hinting at. Let's do it.' "

There were missteps, beginning with billionaire Texas businessman H. Ross Perot. Marcus and Blank desperately needed $2 million to get their business airborne. If Perot would hand over the cash, he would own 70 percent of the new company.

Blank, who calls Perot a "great American," recalled the meeting in which he and Marcus made a presentation to Perot to iron out details. Blank coldly went through the numbers, the high-energy Marcus talked breathlessly about the big picture. A few jokes. Perot, who ran his technology company ? Electronic Data Systems ? with military discipline, never cracked a smile, Blank remembered.

"He made it clear at one point that no facial hair would be acceptable," said Blank, who sported a moustache.

Then the discussion turned to cars.

Marcus said he was driving a 4-year-old Cadillac that he wanted to carry over onto the new company's books. Perot, in his thick Texas drawl, told him to get a Chevy.

"My people don't drive Cadillacs," Marcus, in the book "Built From Scratch," recalled Perot as saying. Marcus argued the used Caddy would be cheaper. "My people don't drive Cadillacs," Perot responded.

Marcus said any chance of a deal died there. If they couldn't agree on a used car, there would certainly be bigger problems.

Perot remembers things differently.

"I was not that interested in investing in retail stores, and also [Wal-Mart founder] Sam Walton was a good friend of mine, and I didn't want to get Sam upset by helping build a competitor," Perot said in a recent interview.

Reminded of Marcus' used-Cadillac-kills-the-deal story, Perot paused, and replied curtly, "Everybody has their own stories."

Marcus and Blank finally got the start-up money from a group of investors Langone cobbled together. One of the wildest rides in retailing history was about to bolt from the starting gate. There was even an early proposal to call the new enterprise "Bad Bernies Buildall."

During the early days, when crowds failed to flock to the first Home Depot stores in Atlanta, Marcus dispatched his children into the parking lots with wads of $1 bills.

"Bernie was a worrier," Langone said. "He would call me every day and tell me how it wasn't going good. Then he came up with the idea of giving people a dollar bill if they'd just go in and look at the store."

When they didn't have enough money to fill their cavernous stores with inventory, they used empty boxes and empty paint cans to feign abundance. At times, the ghost of P.T. Barnum seemed to swirl about the enterprise, Blank remembered.

"We had an idea, but we didn't have any money," Blank said.

Marcus was the tireless cheerleader, and a natural salesman. He was passionate and he really cared about people ? customers and employees ? Blank said. Langone kept the money flowing. And Blank was the no-nonsense accountant who kept the careening retail operation between the ditches.

"Bernie, he would say things in terms of the stock, in terms of the size of the company, the size of the industry, the size of the market, that had no foundation whatsoever," Blank said. "But half the time half of what he said ended up becoming reality.

"People always took a little bit of it with a grain of salt. But there was always the belief that 'If he's right about the half, then this thing is going to end up very, very big.' And so people didn't want to bet against him."

In the end, a lot of people wished they'd bet on Bernie.

Home Depot went public in 1981. The initial stock price was $12 per share. An investor who bought 1,000 shares at that price could have cashed them out 19 years later for about $15.6 million.

Vision of fish

Twenty years after Home Depot went public, then-Gov. Roy Barnes was on a trade mission to Israel. Marcus, who is a Republican, was also in the country and asked Barnes, a Democrat, to fly back with him on the Home Depot plane.

Marcus had a lot of money by the time the Falcon 900 leveled off after takeoff from Tel Aviv in 2001. Forbes last year listed him as No. 106 on their list of wealthiest Americans and this year he was 258th on the list of richest people in the world, with a net worth estimated at $2.4 billion.

"So we were talking on the way back and Bernie says, 'I like fish, and I said 'OK,"' Barnes recalled in a recent interview. "He said, 'I want to give something back to the state of Georgia to thank them for how good and kind they have been to me. I'd like to build an aquarium."'

Somewhere high over the Atlantic Ocean, as Marcus talked and Barnes listened, a vision for the Georgia Aquarium began to gel.

"It was a great trip, and if it hadn't taken place, I don't know that we'd be opening the aquarium," Marcus said.

The state and city quickly lined up to provide tax breaks and basic infrastructure funding.

Four years later, Marcus is getting ready to unwrap his gift to the people of Georgia. The aquarium will open debt-free, thanks to his funding.

He predicts it will attract more than 2 million visitors the first year.

"We're five hours away from the ocean, and there are many children who would never have seen the ocean," Marcus said. "We're going to have fish from rivers, lakes, oceans. There will be fish there that most people would never see in their lifetimes
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[THE KOD]

 

[THE KOD]

Marcus aims to build biggest fish in aquarium sea

As Atlanta gets ready to unveil the still-under-construction Georgia Aquarium, the 76-year-old billionaire behind the project, chamber of commerce types and even competitors are poised to pronounce the facility the biggest indoor aquarium in the United States, and one of the biggest on the planet.

In the land of McMansions and "monster" burgers, marketing gurus say, bigger is better.

"We always like to say bigger, better, best," said Jill Allread of Public Communications Inc., which markets Chicago's Shedd Aquarium. The Shedd currently bills itself as the nation's largest indoor aquarium. "In a competitive market, anything that cuts you away from the others is always an advantage."

And the aquarium world has gotten a lot more competitive. The number of accredited aquariums jumped about 50 percent, to 36, during the past decade as cities from Denver to Camden, N.J., looked to the aquatic showpieces to entice visitors.

The ship-shaped Georgia Aquarium, set to open Nov. 23, will dwarf the nearby Tennessee Aquarium, outsize the world-class Monterey Aquarium in California and even one-up the venerable Shedd Aquarium, the nation's oldest.

Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, the man who dreamed up the world's largest hardware stores and is now spending $200 million of his personal fortune on the facility, has kept many of the aquarium's details under wraps. However, paperwork filed by aquarium officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a prevalent "bigger is better" theme.

One chart carries the heading "More Water, More Fish, More Fun" and shows the Georgia Aquarium topping 10 other U.S. aquariums in volume of water ? a key measure of an aquarium's size. Its tanks will hold more than 5 million gallons of salt and fresh water, trailed by about 4.7 million for the Shedd.

Another chart in the NOAA paperwork shows the Atlanta facility with 55,000 fish and other animals, compared with about 11,500 for the award-winning National Aquarium in Baltimore.

"When I started interviewing aquarium people, they all came to me with the same thing ? we're going to open this nice little aquarium, it's going to be cute, something similar to New Orleans or Chattanooga," Marcus said in a recent interview. "But I said, 'You don't understand what I'm trying to do here. I want something extraordinary. I want something unique.' "

There's likely to be a few big show-stoppers like hammerhead sharks and large octopuses ? one of Marcus' favorites. But he doesn't want just one or two specimens of most other fish. For example, paperwork filed with the state Department of Resources indicates that Marcus hopes to lure as many as 5,000 French grunts, 4,000 yellow tail, 3,000 mullet and a whopping 10,000 scad.

Those numbers could give the Georgia Aquarium a fin up when it comes to luring tourists.

The facility, which overlooks Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta, hopes to attract more than 2 million visitors its first year.

"Even if I've seen an aquarium, perhaps I haven't see the largest one," said Rajiv Grover, head of the marketing department at the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business. "In marketing, you have to give people a reason to buy the product."

Deb Fassnacht, executive vice president of the Shedd, said the Chicago facility's current designation of largest indoor aquarium is not the only reason people come to the facility. The Shedd prides itself on the variety of its exhibits, boasting 1,600 species. The Atlanta facility is expected to have about 500 species.

"Chicago loves to say biggest and best," Fassnacht said. "But ultimately, people come because the product is good."

Superlatives alone don't guarantee success, she said. And they can have a dark side.

"If you use superlatives and you don't deliver on the promise, that can backfire," she warned.

Ken Peterson, public relations manager for the Monterey Bay Aquarium, said his facility intentionally has avoided most superlatives.

"We steer clear of any references to biggest or anything like that because there are so many ways to slice that pie ? square footage, acres, gallons of water, numbers of species, numbers of individual animals," Peterson said. "We've tried to stay with quality. People generally think of us as the best aquarium in the United States."

One of the problems, he said, is that "biggest" is often in the eye of the fish-holder.

"We used to claim a quarter of a million animals in our collection," he said. "But that was counting every coral polyp and every little tube worm. It was ludicrous to do that."

Monterey, he said, has concentrated on quality exhibits that "wow" visitors.

"Are they impressed? Are there literally 'Wows' as they walk through the building that they tell there friends about?"

Still, Peterson said, being able to say you're the biggest has its advantages.

"The world's largest aquarium, the nation's largest aquarium ? sure, it's a good marketing hook," he said.

Allread, meanwhile, said that if the Atlanta facility does prove to be the nation's biggest indoor aquarium when it opens its doors, the Shedd will have to back away from its claim.

"They will always be able to say they are the largest aquarium on the Great Lakes," she said. "You can always find some distinguishing factor."
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[THE KOD]

Georgia Aquarium will be the only place other than Asia where the public can see whale sharks in captivity. The aquarium in Okinawa, Japan, has three whale sharks.

 

[THE KOD]

 

[THE KOD]

hello Atlanta

 

[THE KOD]

Size, Age & Growth
The whale shark is the largest living fish. Maximum size is thought to be 20m. The smallest free-living individuals are from 55cm (21.7 inches) long. Sexual maturity in both sexes may not occur until the sharks are over 9m in length. Age estimates for whale sharks are as high as 60 years, but no one really knows how long this species lives.



? Food Habits
Whale sharks feed on wide variety of planktonic (microscopic) and nektonic (larger free-swimming) prey, such as small crustaceans, schooling fishes, and occasionally on tuna and squids. Also, phytoplankton (microscopic plants) and macroalgae (larger plants) may form a component of the diet. Unlike most plankton feeding vertebrates, the whale shark does not depend on slow forward motion to operate its filtration mechanism. Rather, it relies on a versatile suction filter-feeding method, which enables it to draw water into the mouth at higher velocities than these dynamic filter-feeders, like the basking shark. This enables the whale shark to capture larger more active nektonic prey as well as zooplankton aggregations. Therefore, the whale shark may be more dependent on dense aggregations of prey organisms. The denser filter screens of this shark act as more efficient filters for short suction intakes, in contrast to the flow through systems of basking shark. Whale sharks are always seen feeding passively in a vertical or near vertical position with the head at or near the surface. A whale shark opens its mouth, bringing in plankton-rich water.

The whale shark feeds actively by opening its mouth, distending the jaws and sucking. Than it closes its mouth and the water flow out its gills. During the slight delay between closing the mouth and opening the gill flaps, plankton may be trapped against the dermal denticles lining the gill plates and pharynx. The fine sieve-like apparatus, a unique modification of the gill rakers, forms an obstruction to the passage of anything but fluid, retaining all organisms above 2 to 3mm in diameter. Practically nothing but water goes through this sieve. Individuals have also been observed coughing, a mechanism that is thought to be employed to clear or flush the gill rakers of accumulated food particles. Whale sharks move their heads from side to side, vacuuming in seawater rich in plankton, or aggressively cut swathes through schools of prey. Groups of individuals have been observed feeding at dusk or after dark. The density of plankton probably is sensed by the well-developed nostrils, located on either side of the upper jaw, on the leading edge of the terminal mouth. The frequent turns may keep the whale sharks in the denser parts of the plankton patches, searching and scanning when an olfactory cue weakens on one side or the other. The whale shark's small eyes are located back on the sides of the head. Because of this, vision may play a much smaller role than olfaction in directing the head turns during surface feeding. One live whale shark pup removed from its dead mother was maintained in captivity in Japan. It did not eat for the first 17 days, even though it swam constantly. This suggests that the pup had substantial stores of endogenous (stored) energy.
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[THE KOD]

I really can't wait until this opens up in Nov 2005.

I have been to the Chattanooga Aqurium maybe 5 times over the years. There is something very peacefull about Aquariums.

 

[Penguinfan]

Nice stuff Scott, my kids absolutly love aquariums, they could stay all day in the smallest ones.

 

[ripken8]

scott,

I'll have to bring my grandson down to see it. Maybe you could show us around.

 

[PAWAQATSI]

I wonder if you'll see Troy McClure down at the aquarium? :shrug:

 

[THE KOD]

rip

we may work something out.

Bring Paw with you so I can kick his ars.

 

[THE KOD]