Navy Pier (Chicago, IL)

Navy Pier attracts around 9 million visitors a year, which makes it the most-visited attraction in the Midwest. The gap between that statistic and what the pier actually offers is instructive about how tourism and quality can diverge. The pier extends 1 kilometre into Lake Michigan from Streeterville on Chicago’s near north side, opened in 1916 as a shipping facility, and was redeveloped as a public attraction in 1995 into something that is part tourist boardwalk, part shopping mall, and part genuine lakefront experience. The genuinely good parts are free or cheap. The rest is optional.

What’s Worth Doing

The Centennial Wheel, a 60-metre Ferris wheel installed in 2016, gives the best views over Lake Michigan and the Chicago skyline available anywhere on the north side for $18 per person. On a clear day you can see the Willis Tower, the John Hancock Center, and the lakefront running north to Evanston. The view looking west over the city with the lake behind you is something the city’s interior cannot replicate.

The Chicago Children’s Museum is a genuinely well-designed interactive museum for under-12s – among the better children’s museums in the country at its price point (around $17-20 per person, under-1s free). On a rainy summer day with children, it is the correct answer to the question of what to do.

The Crystal Gardens indoor tropical garden on the second floor is free with pier admission: palms and ferns in a glass atrium. A quieter refuge from summer heat than any of the pier’s commercial spaces.

What’s Not Worth Doing

The shopping is indistinguishable from any other mid-range American retail strip. Chain restaurants, souvenir shops, candy stores. None of these require a specific location on a pier over a lake.

The Better Alternatives Nearby

The Chicago Architecture Center boat tour departing from the Chicago River docks (15 minutes southwest of Navy Pier by walking the lakefront path) is the single best structured introduction to Chicago as a city. The tour covers 50-plus buildings along the Chicago River and explains why Chicago became the place that invented modern American architecture after the 1871 fire. Tours run $45-55 for 90 minutes. Book ahead.

Millennium Park (another 15 minutes southwest along the lakefront trail) contains Cloud Gate (“the Bean”), the Crown Fountain, and the Frank Gehry-designed Pritzker Pavilion for outdoor summer concerts. These are free, genuinely excellent, and occupy 2-3 hours easily. The Art Institute of Chicago is directly adjacent – one of the strongest art collections in North America, with the Seurat, the Hopper, and the Chagall windows.

Garrett Popcorn’s Chicago Mix (caramel corn and cheese corn combined) is available on Navy Pier and from multiple Loop locations. The combination sounds like a bad idea and isn’t. The original shop at 26 W. Randolph Street has been there since 1949 and is the more satisfying version of the same product if you’re already downtown.

Getting There

Bus 124 runs directly from Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street. Taxi or Uber from the Loop takes about 10 minutes in normal traffic. The lakefront walk from Millennium Park covers 15-20 minutes and is straightforwardly pleasant in good weather. Parking on the pier is available, expensive, and entirely unnecessary.