Construction and World War I
Construction began in 1914 under the leadership of Charles Sumner Frost and took two years, at a total cost of $4.5 million. When it opened to the public in 1916, it was the largest pier in the world. The Pier was built both to handle shipping and as an entertainment site. The original Burnham Plan proposed five piers, but only one was commissioned. In 1917-18, during World War I (WWI), the Pier housed many Navy and some Army personnel, the Red Cross, and Home Defense units. It even had a jail for draft dodgers.
Read more about this topic: Navy Pier
Famous quotes containing the words war i, construction, world and/or war:
“A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“There’s no art
To find the mind’s construction in the face.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
““If she belongs to any besides the present, it is to the next world which artists want to see, when paganism will come again and we can give a divinity to every waterfall.””
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“The war was a mirror; it reflected man’s every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, it showed up both with unusual clarity.”
—George Grosz (1893–1959)