While Old Navy Pier Ferris Wheel Getting New Home In Branson, The Original Ferris Wheel Had Different Fate

(CBS) -- It was announced Friday that Navy Pier's old Ferris Wheel is getting a new home in Branson, Missouri, but the original giant Chicago Ferris Wheel had a less happy "second life."

That Ferris Wheel, the first of its kind, was massive, even bigger than the one at Navy Pier. It was 264 feet high, and its 36 cars were the size of buses, fitting up to 60 people each.

After the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition ended no one was quite sure what to do with it. For a while it was moved to Chicago's North Side then it was used at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair before it was blown up and used for scrap metal.

Kris Rowberry is an expert on amusement parks and attractions, he says the destruction of the original Ferris Wheel was tragic, telling WBBM, "imagine seeing something that now we look at as being something so historic and so important, being just literally blown up!"

Rowberry says destroying the original Ferris Wheel would have been like destroying Paris' Eiffel Tower which also was not meant to be permanent.

But Michael Safer, president of the Hyde Park Historical Society, tells WBBM that some part of the Ferris Wheel actually still exists, noting that "in September of 2000 when they were expanding the skating rink structure on the Midway at the University of Chicago they actually found the foundation of the original Ferris Wheel."

While Rowberry and Safer both say it's a shame that nothing else is left of the original mammoth Ferris Wheel, World Fairs back then were not made to be permanent and the destruction of such treasures is a bit of a reflection of America's "throwaway society."

One more sad note, the man who dreamed of and created the original Ferris Wheel, George Washington Gale Ferris died soon after the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition succumbing to tuberculosis on November 22, 1896. He was only 37.