Teboho Masupha remembers when a ride on the Navy Pier Ferris wheel cost a fraction of the current price.
Other than that, the Pier Park assistant operations manager said, not much about the wheel has changed since he started working as a host at the park in 2001.
“The Ferris wheel is its own structure,” Masupha said. “And it has a lot of stories.”
The 20-year-old wheel took its last turn Sunday evening, and workers began dismantling it Monday. The structure is expected to be removed entirely by Halloween and a new wheel is scheduled to be in place in mid-2016, part of $26.5 million in improvements at pier park, said Navy Pier Inc. spokesman Nick Shields.
About 30,000 people lined up throughout the weekend for a last ride on the wheel, some riders too young to remember the Ferris wheel’s 1995 installation and some parents bringing young children to experience a ride that had been part of their upbringing. Some had never been on a Ferris wheel, and others conquered a fear of heights to experience the wheel’s last day. Local celebrities and Mayor Rahm Emanuel were scheduled to ride the wheel.
More than 7,200 riders went up in gondolas while the wheel remained open overnight Saturday, officials said.
The last guests boarded the Ferris wheel Sunday night. Navy Pier Inc. CEO Marilynn Gardner, film critic Richard Roeper and Navy Pier Inc. board member Jim Reilly were among the guests who got off the last gondola as a fireworks show began in the background.
A handful of disappointed residents were turned away from the ticket booth. Nicole Peto, her three young sons and her fiancee were nearly part of that group but were able to fit in a “super awesome” ride just before 8 p.m.
“I’ve had rides as a child on this Ferris wheel,” she said. “And I wanted my sons to experience the same thing.”
Officials are in the final stages of selling the old Ferris wheel to a company, Shields said. He declined to elaborate on the buyer.
The installation of the new wheel coincides with a revitalization of Navy Pier and its centennial anniversary in 2016. The new wheel will stand at 196 feet — almost 50 feet higher than the old one, though still shorter than the original Ferris wheel built for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago — and will be able to hold eight adults and two children in each of its 42 temperature-controlled gondolas, officials said.
But it is the old Ferris wheel’s stories that Masupha, 43, and Pier Park attraction supervisor Martese Cotton, 37, recalled Sunday. Cotton, who said he has worked at the park since 1998, said he has met singers, athletes and mayors on the wheel. He started working at the park when he was 20 and grew up working next to the Ferris wheel, he said.
Masupha remembered would-be riders offering bribes or clearing the cars’ windows in a snowstorm hoping for a turn on the wheel. When he first began working, he said, staff would put red covers on the gondolas in the winter.
There will be new gondolas to adjust to and new passenger-loading procedures to learn, the employees said.
But Saturday night, Masupha said he joined the crowds on the old Ferris wheel and snapped a few pictures. And he expected to be at work early Monday morning and watch the beginning of the wheel’s dismantlement.
“We’ll say the final goodbye,” he said.
Twitter @srfreish
