Fourth Use: Public Gathering Place
From 1965–1989, Navy Pier was considered underutilized.
In the bicentennial year of 1976, opened by a concert by Fort Sheridan's 81st Army Band, Navy Pier began its fourth life as an area for public exhibits, when the East Buildings (furthest into Lake Michigan) were opened as exhibition halls. Special events including music and arts festivals (ChicagoFest was one) began to draw crowds to the Pier despite its aging infrastructure.
The halls were used to represent Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the 1986 movie The Color of Money for the 9-Ball Championship. From 1979 to 1987, a submarine, the USS Silversides, was docked at Navy Pier.
In 1989, the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority took control over the Pier. Major renovation and construction followed in the 1990s at a cost of US$200 million. As rebuilt in the 1990s, the Pier's layout included fast-food kiosks, shops, a ballroom, a concert stage, and convention exhibition halls.
Centerpiece attractions include a Ferris wheel, an IMAX theater, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Amazing Chicago's Funhouse Maze, the Chicago Children's Museum, the Smith Museum of Stained Glass Windows, and at the entrance to Navy Pier is a statue of Oak Park comedian Bob Newhart, sponsored by the TV Land network.
The Pier now features a large front lawn showcasing numerous larger-than-life public art sculptures and an interactive animated fountain created by WET (of Fountains of Bellagio fame). The Pier continues to be used as an embarkation point for tour and excursion boats and is a popular place to watch lakefront events, including the annual Air and Water airshow and the parade of lighted and decorated boats during Chicago's Venetian Night festival.
The Pier and its grounds encompass more than 50 acres (200,000 m2) of parks, gardens, shops, restaurants and other shore entertainment. Navy Pier contains 170,000 total square feet of exhibition space, 50,000 square feet (5,000 m2) of reception space and 48,000 square feet (4,500 m2) of meeting room space.
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Famous quotes containing the words public, gathering and/or place:
“I ask whether the mere eating of human flesh so very far exceeds in barbarity that custom which only a few years since was practised in enlightened England:Ma convicted traitor, perhaps a man found guilty of honesty, patriotism, and suchlike heinous crimes, had his head lopped off with a huge axe, his bowels dragged out and thrown into a fire; while his body, carved into four quarters, was with his head exposed upon pikes, and permitted to rot and fester among the public haunts of men!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Being fooled, by foolery thrive;
There’s place and means for every man alive.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)