Perhaps the most popular thing about Navy Pier is the simplest, the one that required no renovation, no rehab, no pyrotechnics, no lobbying of neighbors: The electrifying view of the city.
“There’s just nothing like it,” coos Margaret Shelly, a visitor from Miller Beach, Ind., who says that, though she’s been coming to Chicago for summer excursions all her life, she had never really seen the skyline before coming to Navy Pier a few years ago. “You can see the downtown, and then you look up north and there are all those beaches. And it’s free!”
Navy Pier, the Midwest’s most visited tourist attraction, will draw about 8.2 million visitors this year, according to pier projections. That figure is perhaps more astonishing when placed next to what the planners projected for 2000.
“The experts told us that in our fifth year, if we had everything in place, we’d do 3.5 to 4 million tops,” says Jon Clay, the pier’s general manager, with a laugh. “But even if you take away the convention business — the people who just come in to their trade show or whatever and don’t do anything else on the pier — we still have 6.7 million of pure general public.”
From its debut in 1916, Navy Pier was designed to showcase its city vistas. From its start too, that long stretch of concrete was supposed to offer something different and new to Chicagoans by way of entertainment.
The musical carousel that so gently spins in the shadow of the more spectacular 15-story Ferris wheel is a throwback to those early efforts, a bit of history in what has become something of an urban sensation.
Navy Pier contains a mix of old and new, young and old, black and white and Latino and Asian, local and tourist, high and low culture, fine dining and fast food, upscale and free activities.
“Whether I’m broke or in the money, I can always find something to do here,” says Joe Martinez, a 16-year-old from Humboldt Park. “It’s CTA fare and then maybe $5 to get a Coke or something to eat. There’s plenty to do here. Some of it’s kind of cheesy, but most of it is OK.”
Not everyone agrees it’s so cheap. “Once you’re here, you can’t help but spend money — not just on food but on other things because, especially, if you come with kids, they get tempted, they want to do things, and you’re not going to bring them here and not let them do anything,” says Jose Peral, from the Northwest Side.
Though it can run into a bit of an expense sometimes, Peral still thinks it’s worth the long ride downtown. “To me, it feels like the center of town, like the plazas in Mexican towns where there’s always something going on and you get to see people you know,” he says. “It’s an easy way to spend the time.”
The strange thing is that, mostly, it works: If you just want to hang, you can. If you’re headed to the pier for a specific event, like Art Chicago or a concert, you can skip everything else. You can have a hot dog or dine at Riva’s, do business at one of the trade shows and never see the inline skaters, or actually rent inline skates and whiz around the businesspeople.
All along the pier, one can’t avoid entertainment: The Navy Pier Players pop up singing a cappella; A Piering Daily, a comedy improv group, runs around most afternoons. There are strolling musicians, stiltwalkers, costumed characters based on Chicago caricatures — from a sassy mid-20th Century newspaper reporter to a more current maniac shopper on Michigan Avenue (but no gangsters!).
“We needed to brand ourselves, so we came up with the Navy Pier Players,” says Clay, who’s been involved with the pier since 1989. All the performers, including the house band, are auditioned, salaried and trained. Only the sanctioned performers are allowed on the midway.
“We spend $5 million a year on free entertainment,” says Clay. “We thought it would be an important aspect of our success. When you come to the pier, you should see something a little different and feel like you’ve been entertained without spending money.”
Originally, the Players didn’t rove around the pier. But when visitor surveys suggested that it would be better if they weren’t in just one or two places, the performers began moving. Visitor feedback also affected the Halloween celebrations. The first couple of times they were determined to be too scary, so Clay asked the performers to tone it down.
“Generally, there’s a lot more meet and greet now, the performers interact more,” says Clay. “It’s friendlier.”
Navy Pier is, front and center, family entertainment. In fact, it all has a kind of wholesome, Disneyesque-quality. There are no blue jokes from the comedians, no chance of a raw or ugly note from the band.
On the Skyline stage, the staple is a showcase of smooth jazz. Earlier this summer, a Latin oldies bill was packaged as the Latin Legends. The schedule includes such family-oriented fare as Sinbad, the Beach Boys, Paula Poundstone, and the Four Tops; String Cheese Incident is about as alternative as it gets.
The one place where innovation has a foothold is on the stages of the Chicago Shakespeare Repertory. Besides their usual classic fare, the group sponsors wackier offerings like the current “Hamlet: The Musical.”
But no matter what’s on the stage, they’re packing them in. Since arriving at Navy Pier, the group’s subscription base has skyrocketed from 7,000 (in their last season at the Ruth Page Theater) to 17,000 (in their inaugural pier season).
“Everyone said the real test would be the second season,” says Criss Henderson, the troupe’s executive director. “Well, we have 21,000 subscribers this year and will have to stop because otherwise there will be no tickets available for single buyers. We got 85 percent subscription renewal from last year. We’re ecstatic.”
The theater, now housed in a multilevel facility with breathtaking views (even from the bathrooms!), has been re-energized by its new home.
“The wonder of it all isn’t lost on us — there are thousands of people who might not ever come to see us otherwise,” says Henderson. “And we’re running practically all day — we start `Romeo and Juliet’ in the day then `Hamlet’ goes to midnight. I don’t think anyone imagined this, although Barbara [Gaines, the company’s founder and artistic director], of course, has always had faith in the power of Shakespeare.”
It was Gaines, says Henderson, who really had faith in the move to Navy Pier. Although it’s been a smashing success, not everyone backed it initially.
“A lot of people said Navy Pier wasn’t a place for serious art, so it was a risk,” he says. “There may have been other sites that made more sense in other locales, but we did want Shakespeare to be a part of the city, to be available to all kinds of people. You know, minimally, there’s a 60-foot marquee with Shakespeare’s name on it — and that sends a dramatic message that Chicago takes its culture seriously. I mean, look, it made room for Shakespeare at this amazing tourist destination.”
It’s also making room for Timescape, a virtual reality theater, right next to Shakespeare Rep. The computer-generated thrill ride should be ready to go in the fall.
Navy Pier “feeds our energy,” says Henderson. “The reality is you can take an `L’ to Chicago and State and hop on a free trolley, and there are always performances out on the pier, and the food has a wide range. There are fireworks. You can see `Romeo and Juliet’ for $10, go to the IMAX for $10, the Children Museum’s free on Thursday. Or you can drive and pay parking, but it’s no more than parking in the Loop, and a lot better managed.”
Clay, however, wants to do more, starting with a new marina on the north side.
“We also want to do a light and water show the full length of the south docks,” he says. “It would have huge fountains — maybe five fountains, a dancing wall of water a thousand feet long. We’d program it every hour, then a grand finale at the time you’d normally do fireworks.”
Still, Clay isn’t in a big hurry to add too much. He knows, like Shelly, that the biggest draw isn’t the plethora of activities on the pier, but the jaw-dropping panorama it offers.
“Look, a mom and dad and a kid can walk out, look out at the city and you get the feeling you’re on an ocean liner,” says Clay. “You do the same thing — all the activities, all the entertainment — in a suburban location and I’m not sure how successful we’d be. On the surveys we do quarterly, visitors consistently tell us that the only or main reason to come is to stroll up and down the dock and look at the skyline.”
