Navy Pier

Navy Pier extends three thousand three hundred feet into Lake Michigan, a long, narrow finger of land anchored by a large ballroom and freight sheds. Completed in nineteen sixteen as the Municipal Pier, it was designed by architect Charles Sumner Frost to realize a vision from Daniel Burnham's nineteen zero nine Plan of Chicago. The structure rests on twenty thousand wooden piles driven into the lakebed, intended originally to handle both commercial cargo ships and public recreation.