Chicago’s Navy Pier To Close For The Rest Of The Year

Not enough visitors means that not enough money is coming in, so Navy Pier will call it quits for 2020 on September 8th.

As someone who always enjoys a trip to Chicago's Navy Pier (especially around the holidays), I'm sorry to see that Navy Pier is closing up shop, but I fully understand the motivation behind the move.

They're currently losing a lot of money, and in order to protect the "financial health" of Navy Pier, they've determined that continuing to hemorrhage cash now could spell even bigger problems in the future.

Navy Pier is already on track to lose $20 million this year due to the pandemic and continuing rioting, which is more than a third of last year's revenue.

Marilynn Gardner, president and CEO of Navy Pier:

We are only seeing about 15 to 20 percent of the attendance that we would typically see this time of year, which is also typically our busiest time of the year. We need to do this now to get to the other side of the pandemic.

I didn't know until this morning that Navy Pier was first opened in 1916, as part of Daniel Burnham's plan to transform Chicago's lakefront into a public space for recreation and social interaction. Since Navy Pier's grand reopening in 1995, the Pier has welcomed over 186 million guests, including a record-breaking 9.3 million in 2016.

Since we're doing everything remotely these days anyway, here's more on Navy Pier's history: