Hogwarts Campus to Open in Chicago Museum

If you've read all the Harry Potter books (or even just seen the movies) have we got good news for you. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is launching a new Harry Potter exhibit full of artifacts from the books and movies.

The Exhibition takes visitors from the Hogwarts Express train platform through the Gryffindor common room, classrooms, the Great Hall, the Forbidden Forest and Hagrid's hut. The tour is populated with creatures from the seven novels by J.K. Rowling and six Potter movies: life-sized centaurs, Buckbeak the hippogriff, dementors, thestrals and Dobby the house elf.

According to museum president and CEO David Mosena, the exhibit could be a traffic driver at a time when most museums are seeing a decline in attendance. The hope is that the new exhibit will attract visitors the same way pop-culture-oriented exhibits have in the past (e.g. Star Wars and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation).

The exhibit opens April 30th and runs through September 27th, at which point it will go on tour. The greatest benefit of all this will not be increasing museum revenue, but exposing children to the scientific side of their favorite fantasies.

Anne Rashford, director of temporary exhibits at the museum, had this to say:

Museums recognize that if popular culture can get kids excited to come to the museum and then we can expose them to 14 acres of science, that's a really good thing.