The temperature on the end of Navy Pier drops about five degrees in the twenty minutes after sunset, which is roughly the gap between when people start looking at the sky and when anything happens in it. The fireworks ran Wednesdays at nine and Saturdays at ten from May 23rd through September 5th, and they were free.

Fifteen weeks, two nights a week, at no charge, on the most-visited attraction in the Midwest. The residents of this city have collectively decided that this is for tourists, and go anyway by accident about once a summer.

The Best Seats Are Not on the Pier

The pier itself is the worst place to watch from, because you are underneath it and the Ferris wheel is in the way. The good vantages are all free and all elsewhere: the lakefront path north of the pier, the Ohio Street beach, the upper floors of anywhere on Michigan Avenue with a north-east window, and best of all a boat.

From the water you get the whole thing — the bursts, the illuminated skyline behind them, and the lit Ferris wheel on the horizon in the same frame — and the boats cluster far enough out that the sound arrives a beat late. People who own boats here know this. People who rent them find out once.

What the Pier Was Built For

It opened in 1916 as Municipal Pier, a working freight and passenger dock with a streetcar line down the middle, and it has been a university campus, a Navy training centre during the Second World War, and a mostly derelict stretch of concrete before the current arrangement. The fireworks are a twice-weekly argument that a commercial attraction still owes the city something free, and they are the only part of the pier that costs nothing.

The July 4th show is the one everybody attends and the worst one to pick, because the crowd is four times normal and the programme is the same.

The “noise” of a fireworks night downtown is mostly car horns and the pier's own PA, and from a mile north on the path you hear neither — just the delayed thump, about two seconds behind the light.

Dr. Wendy Goodall McDonald went on the Fourth and filmed the pier so crowded she could not get to the rail. She watched the whole show from a spot she had not chosen.

Cover image: Navy Pier fireworks / Wikimedia Commons