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The 150-foot Ferris Wheel that for 20 years rotated visitors through the air at Chicago’s Navy Pier was set to open Thursday in its new digs.

Beginning its public spins at noon at a Track Family Fun Parks location on the Hwy. 76 main drag in Branson, Mo., the wheel has been rebuilt, with a new main axle and bearings, repainted, and adorned with tens of thousands of LED lights.

But it remains fundamentally the same wheel that was a leading attraction in Chicago and on Navy Pier, serving up about 750,000 rides a year. And it will be prominently billed as the former Navy Pier wheel, creating a sort of circular synergy between two leading Midwestern tourism meccas.

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“We love the thought of a Ferris wheel in Branson,” said Craig Wescott, president and CEO of Track Parks, which has four amusement locations in Branson. “When we got word of this one, we really loved what it was. It was an icon in Chicago. We just loved that it came with a story.”

Wescott starred in a Track YouTube video highlighting the wheel’s construction in Branson. It is now billed as the Branson Ferris Wheel.

The project cost Track $4 million, Wescott said, half of that for the wheel itself, the rest for siting and other improvements. It becomes one of the taller structures in the tourist city, although there is a 170-foot water tower right across the street, he said.

“This park is kind of in a gentle corner on Hwy. 76,” said Wescott. “It’s on one side of the park, and we have one of our big four-story go-kart tracks on the other side as one of our, I guess you’d call it, anchors. It took the place of one of our mini golf courses.”

Track was planning to charge $12 for adults to ride, $8 for kids 4-11, he said. The cost of a ride at Navy Pier was $8.

The Centennial Wheel, the 196-foot wheel that opened on Navy Pier in late May on the site of the old one, charges $15 for an adult ride and features enclosed, eight-person gondolas instead of the old wheel’s six-person, open-air seating arrangement.

“It seemed like a no-brainer from the get-go,” Wescott said of the opportunity to acquire the Chicago wheel, which was purchased from and transported and erected by Dutch Wheels, the Netherlands company that originally sold it and the Centennial Wheel to Navy Pier.

Wescott said he is especially enamored of “the story that comes with it. People that live here and visit here really appreciate history and story and things like that.”

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Twitter: @StevenKJohnson

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