Right in line with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and next to the Barnes Foundation and the Rodin Museum is The Franklin Institute. The Franklin Institute is a science museum mainly aimed at kids. But from February of this year through September 18, 2022, the Franklin is hosting Harry Potter: The Exhibition.
Harry Potter: The Exhibition
This traveling Harry Potter Exhibition is a fantastic behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Harry Potter movies. It also includes the Fantastic Beasts movies and the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. I’ll talk about prices below, but you can buy evening tickets for just Harry Potter: The Exhibition, or a daytime combo ticket for both it and the rest of The Franklin Institute.
When you enter The Franklin Institute (look for the Golden Snitch outside!), scan your ticket at one of several kiosks in the atrium. While it might be possible to buy a ticket at the door on the premises, you probably want to make sure to get a timed entry spot online beforehand. Harry Potter: The Exhibition is VERY popular. Even the Reading Terminal Market was celebrating its arrival!
After scanning your museum admission, walk to the back of the atrium to sign into the Harry Potter experience. (Which sort of looks like Platform 9¾.)You get a wristband, which you tap on a metal plate and enter some basic information into a kiosk. Then as you move through the exhibition, your information will follow you and you can earn points for your Hogwarts house! (It is helpful to know what yours is ahead of time – take the official quiz here.)
Marauder’s Map Room
Harry Potter: The Exhibition starts in a holding room with huge wall screens. Initially, it’s a black & white representation of the Marauder’s Map. Soon, a video & projection presentation starts, filling the screens and revealing a scrim behind which are painted flats representing Hogwarts Castle.
At some point, you are instructed to tap your wristband on a plate in the room and everyone’s names pop up on a more movie-accurate Marauder’s Map (red ink on parchment.) All the names float there while you exit the room. The whole thing feels very much like the pre-show at a Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios.
The Grand Staircase
Next is the Grand Staircase – which isn’t a staircase at all, it’s a hallway. But this section has moving portraits, just like in the movies. It’s exactly like the queue for Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey at Universal.
You also start seeing signs with behind-the-scenes information about how they bring the books to life in the movies. Apparently, several crew members make appearances in the hallway portraits.
Hogwarts House Rooms
At the end of the Grand Staircase hall, you come to a circular room with four doorways. Each one leads to a different Hogwarts House – or, at least a room featuring costumes and props representing each house.
You can also walk from room to room on the outside of the circle, without going through each door. This has the nice effect of breaking everyone up from the group we’ve been in since the Marauder’s Map Room, and the crowd starts to thin out a bit.
The Great Hall
Behind the ring of the Hogwarts house rooms is a path to The Great Hall. It’s not quite as impressive as the real thing, but a screen makes it look a bit bigger. And with the screen, you can see snow, owls delivering notes, and Halloween pumpkins over the hall tables.
Classrooms
Now we get into a more interactive section, the Hogwarts classrooms. In each, you are given a chance to earn points for your house! The first room is Wands, where you are assigned a wand and do some practice spells. Each successful spell earns you 10 points for your house. (Though you can’t do them more than once.)
In Potions, put together ingredients on a screen to win points. (Tip – the potions you need will light up at the back! I totally didn’t notice.)
You also see costumes for Severus Snape and Horace Slughorn, as if they’re at the front teaching class.
Next door in Defense Against the Dark Arts, there are costumes for Gilderoy Lockhart and Remus Lupin. Then try a Ridikkulus spell to banish a Boggart in a wardrobe for points.
In the very red Divination room, tap your band to read your fortune in a crystal ball and get points for your house.
Unfortunately, there are no points to be won in Herbology, just some screaming mandrakes.
The Forbidden Forest
Next, you head out of Hogwarts and into the Forbidden Forest where you learn to cast a Patronus spell.
Then there are loads of props from the Triwizard Tournament. There are costumes for Harry, Cedric, Fleur Delacour, and Viktor Krum; the Goblet of Fire, the Golden Egg, and the Triwizard Cup. There’s even a Hungarian Horntail dragon!
Next, you come to Hagrid’s Hut. Inside are several chairs, Hagrid’s pink umbrella, and a dragon egg bubbling happily in the fire.
Quidditch
After Hagrid’s Hut is a gallery dedicated to Quidditch, the magical sport of wizards & witches. A massive golden snitch hangs overhead, while quidditch robes and two Quidditch broomsticks reside in a case.
But the fun part is a quidditch-hoop game. You don’t earn any points for your house, but you hear applause if you can throw a quaffle through one of the rings.
The Ministry of Magic
After Quidditch, there’s a fun section about wizarding travel. You can travel by the Floo Network of fireplaces – a fun “whoosh” happens when you walk through the green lights.
Nearby, grab an old boot to activate a Portkey. Video screens surround you to make you feel you’ve moved!
Now you’ve been transported into the Ministry of Magic. This area is full of photo-ops, from the phone booth visitors’ entrance, Newt Scamander’s desk, to Dolores Umbridge’s hyper-pink office.
A section further on covers wizarding families, with Harry’s cupboard under the stairs and Sirius Black’s extensive family tree. There are plenty of costumes are in this area as well.
Dark Magic
Next up is a section that walks you through Voldemort’s story, the creation and destruction of the seven Horcruxes, and the three items of the Deathly Hallows.
There are set pieces like the vault door for the Chamber of Secrets and some cool projections. A really fun area is a spot where you can have a wand duel! There are two fixed wands on either side of the room, and when each wand is held, wall projections show the streams of power meeting in the middle. Sometimes one or the other side “wins” and sometimes it’s a draw! It is really fun to watch.
Last Chance for Points
Across from the wand duel are the costumes for Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Neville Longbottom, worn in the final movies. Then you pass another set of pale grey costumes for Harry and Dumbledore as they appeared in the dream-like Limbo at the end of the series.
Finally, you end up in a room that has elements of Dumbledore’s office, with lots of doohickeys on shelves and a Pensieve. In the Pensieve, you can win a few more points by tapping your band, which makes your face appear in the swirling mist on a screen. This one was hard to get to work but worth the effort. At the end, you see the current tally of house points on a screen with real-time results. (Overachieving Griffyndors.)
Exit Through the Gift Shop
And, of course, you exit Harry Potter: The Exhibition through a gift shop! There is exhibition-specific merch as well as stuff you can find at Universal Studios and lots of places out in the wild, especially the food items like chocolate frogs and Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans. You can also buy bottled butterbeer here, which I did and it was fine. Nothing like what you can get at the parks.
Overall, Harry Potter: The Exhibition is an amazing experience and well worth the money for any Harry Potter fan! After September 18, the exhibition will be traveling to a new destination, so look for it to maybe pop up somewhere closer to you.
It costs $30 to visit Harry Potter: The Exhibition in the evenings, from 5-8 pm, though the last entry is at 6:30 pm. To go during the day, you have to add on (discounted) admission to the Franklin Institute for a total of $43 for adults. I’ll cover all the differences in price at the end of the post. Plan on taking between an hour and a half to two hours to go through it well. It took me over an hour and a half and I didn’t even read all the signs.
The Franklin Institute
Since I went in the daytime, I also had admission to the rest of The Franklin Institute. It’s fun, but definitely aimed at kids.
Harry Potter: The Exhibition is at the top of the building so I worked my way down from there, and that’s the order in which I’ll cover the rest of the museum.
Staircase & Foucault Pendulum
One of the coolest things at The Franklin Institute (besides Harry Potter) is the massive Foucault Pendulum suspended in the large central staircase. Léon Foucault proved the rotation of the earth in 1851 with a similar pendulum in Paris.
The Franklin Institute’s pendulum has been swinging for 80 years, a 180-lb ball on an 85-foot wire. Set up around the base is a series of metal pins. Every 20 minutes or so, the ball knocks down a pin. Though it’s not the pendulum that is making the shift, it’s the earth rotating under it.
Sir Isaac’s Loft
Harry Potter: The Exhibition exits right near Sir Isaac’s Loft, a playground for small kids. In this brightly-colored room, children can “experiment” with force, gravity, and motion in bins of sand, lifting their own weight with pulleys, and platforms to sit and spin on. In the center is a huge Rube Goldberg-like machine of kinetic movement, moving 18 golf balls through a series of spirals, tubes, and whirlygigs.
SportsZone
Next door is SportsZone, a hall to see how high you can jump to touch a basketball, how fast you can run, even calculate some calories. Down the center is a timed two-lane race. It’s fun to see families compete.
Tech Studio
In an area around the central staircase is the Tech Studio with some modern robotics and 3D printing. One area features Philadelphia landmarks built with Lego bricks. Another has a 3D printed motorcycle and a bust of Ben Franklin being printed out layer by colorful layer.
Demonstration Theater
The last thing on the third floor is the Musser Demonstration Theater. I stopped in to see a fun, high-energy, kid-friendly demonstration on nitrogen in the Liquid Air Show. In liquid form, it shatters a bouncy ball, and was puffed over the audience with an air cannon. It was really entertaining!
There are other live science demonstrations here in this theater and down in the second-floor atrium between 11-4 every day. There doesn’t seem to be an online schedule for these, so either ask someone or hope you come across some as you tour.
The Giant Heart
On the second floor is one of The Franklin Institute’s most famous exhibits, The Giant Heart. It’s a massive heart you can walk through! And it’s not just kid-sized, though it’s mostly children running through it. Adults can fit too – it’s really fun. There are some stairs and tight squeezes.
Past the heart is a huge floor map of Philadelphia. It’s fun to pick out where you live (or are staying) on it.
Electricity
Next to The Giant Heart is the Electricity room, all about Ben Franklin’s discovery and current uses. There’s a big Tesla coil on the ceiling, but it didn’t go off when I was in there. (On further research, it used to go off at the top of every hour but I’m not sure if they’re doing that right now.)
Other displays use hand cranks, test power economy, and plates that make your hand buzz.
Changing Earth
In the Changing Earth room, calculate your carbon footprint, create an earthquake, or give a green-screen weather report. See all the ways that the earth changes regularly and how it affects the weather.
The Franklin Air Show
In the back of this side of The Franklin Institute is The Franklin Air Show, an exhibit featuring experiments with air and real airplanes! You can sit in the cockpit of a modern fighter jet and see an early Wright-brothers flyer.
Also on the second floor is a historical exhibit on the Amazing Machine, featuring the Maillardet Automaton, a “robot” built around 1800 who can draw four drawings and write three poems. Also on that side of the building is Your Brain, a room explaining what we know – and don’t know – about how the brain works. It also features a “neural net” climbing structure but that still seems to be closed for Covid.
I am only realizing now that I completely missed these two areas! And I really would have liked to see the automaton. This second floor is the main floor with the big atrium and most “big ticket” attractions, like the Giant Heart, the Tesla coil, and the automaton. But this goes to show that it doesn’t have a very intuitive layout. Make sure you explore all the corners! The two galleries I missed are on the gift shop side of the ticketing atrium. (I totally missed the gift shop too.)
Space Command
Heading downstairs is Space Command, where you can explore the phases of the moon, see a moon rock, and test a gravity well.
There’s also a small Jellyfish exhibit, but it didn’t look like much. I might have missed the point.
Fels Planetarium
Like any good science museum, The Franklin Institute has a Planetarium. The Fels Planetarium has a 60-foot dome with three shows that rotate throughout the day, Astral Almanac: A Festival of Light, The Sky Tonight, and To Space and Back.
When I came by, the area was empty and there wasn’t a sign for the next show, so I thought it was closed. And it might have been during my March visit. Currently, all shows are running but at a limited capacity.
Since I found it a little hard to find showtimes, I’ll list them here: Astral Almanac is at 11:45 am & 4:30 pm. The Sky Tonight is at 12:30 & 3:30 pm, and To Space and Back is at 11:00 am & 2:30 pm. All shows seem to be about 25 minutes long.
There’s also an open-air Observatory on the top floor. It’s only open on the weekends from 12-3 pm when the weather is good.
The Train Factory
In the back of the first floor is The Train Factory, featuring a huge steam locomotive. The 350-ton train was hoisted into place in 1933 while The Franklin Institute was being built.
In the exhibit, you learn about trains from the original steam locomotives to modern mag-lev high-speed trains.
Visiting The Franklin Institute
Visiting The Franklin Institute does seem to require a little advanced planning. Besides making sure you have an online timed ticket – especially for Harry Potter: The Exhibition – it helps to know when stuff is going to happen around the museum. And make sure you don’t miss a whole side of it like me! Ack.
I arrived at 9:30 am when The Franklin Institute opens, spent almost two hours in Harry Potter: The Exhibition, and covered the rest of the museum before lunch. And while I absolutely touched and walked through most of the things you can touch and walk through, visiting alone and without children means it goes by pretty quick. I had expected to spend a full day but I didn’t find that to be the case as a solo adult traveler.
Food
There is The Eatery at the front of The Franklin Institute if you need to take a break for lunch. There’s also a cafe with drinks and snacks in the atrium. The Eatery is open 11-3 during the week and until 4:00 on the weekends. The Cafe is open from 9:30 am to 7 pm daily.
Otherwise, food is whatever you can find in the city nearby. Behind the museum is a coffee shop and a gyro place.
Parking
There is a dedicated parking garage at The Franklin Institute which costs $20 per day. If it’s full, there are other places to park nearby – the website includes several suggestions, plus the exact address for the parking garage.
For public transportation, there are bus stops right in front of the museum served by SEPTA bus routes 32, 33, 38, and 49.
Hours
The Franklin Institute is open every day from 9:30 am to 5 pm. However, Harry Potter: The Exhibition has special hours from 9:30 am to 8 pm Monday-Thursday (last entry at 6:30 pm) and 9:30 am-8:30 pm Friday-Sunday (last entry at 7 pm.)
Tickets
To visit just The Franklin Institute, adults cost $23, ages 3-11 cost $19, seniors 65+ and active military cost $21. In all instances, you much choose a date and time for your ticket. Buy your tickets online here.
To visit Harry Potter during the day, the cost includes Harry Potter: The Exhibition and the rest of The Franklin Institute. The cost for the whole shebang is $43 for adults, $39 for kids 3-11, and $41 for seniors and active military.
To visit just Harry Potter: The Exhibition, you have to go in the evening, between 5 and 6:30 pm Mon-Thurs, or 5-7 pm Fri-Sun. The cost is $30 each, regardless of age or status. There’s also a $59 option for a VIP experience, which includes a lanyard, an audio tour, and a $10 discount on a souvenir photo. You still have to choose what day you go, but you can go in any time slot. (And I would assume that includes the rest of The Franklin Institute as well.)
Conclusion
I’m pretty chapped that I missed the automaton exhibit because I don’t think I’d pay $20+ to go to The Franklin Institute again, not as an adult. But the Harry Potter special exhibit is absolutely worth paying the full daytime price! I enjoyed that a lot. I almost wish I had stayed in there longer. (It makes me wonder if I could have gone through it again during my day – and racked up more points for Hufflepuff! – but I suspect you can’t.)
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