Municipal Pier opened in July 1916 with a deck running 3,300 feet into open water, built for freight steamers rather than diners. Charles Sumner Frost designed it, and the city renamed it Navy Pier in 1927 to honor naval personnel trained there during the First World War. Excursion steamers had already turned the lake into a place of leisure; by the 1920s Chicagoans boarded them by the thousand for a few hours of air and distance. Lake Michigan Dinner Cruise Chicago tours inherit that habit without much alteration. The pier's middle century was not scenic. The Navy requisitioned it in 1942 for wartime training, while two Great Lakes side-wheelers converted into flat-topped carriers, the Wolverine and the Sable, ran deck-landing qualifications offshore. From 1946 to 1965 the University of Illinois taught undergraduates in its sheds. Decades of vacancy followed. The redevelopment completed in 1995 returned the waterfront to public use, and the 196-foot Centennial Wheel followed in 2016, a descendant of the 264-foot original built for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. What makes the water route distinctive is engineering rather than scenery alone. Chicago reversed its river in 1900, sending the current inland toward the Mississippi basin, and the Chicago Harbor Lock, finished in 1938, still governs the seam between river and lake. Every vessel crossing between the two passes through that chamber, dropping or rising a few feet in minutes. Freighters, sightseeing boats and the Coast Guard share the same channel, and the lock crew sequences them by radio. Chicago River architecture cruises made this passage famous in the 1980s. The evening skyline cruise from Navy Pier is its later, quieter cousin. Read from open water, the skyline arranges itself in layers. The Wrigley Building's terra-cotta cladding, completed in 1924, still catches floodlight after dark. Tribune Tower rose beside it in 1925, its buttresses copied from Rouen. Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City corncobs arrived in 1964; Lake Point Tower, curved and bronze-glassed, in 1968. Willis Tower topped out at 442 metres in 1973 and held the height record for 25 years. Offshore, the Chicago Harbor Lighthouse — built for the 1893 exposition and moved to the breakwater in 1919 — marks the harbor entrance. A Lake Michigan Dinner Cruise Chicago tour reads that century of construction as a single elevation, which no sidewalk in Streeterville can offer.