Liberty Science Center One of Top
Things To Do In Jersey City NJ

With chilly weather approaching here in New Jersey, many of us are going to be looking for fun indoor things to do – especially those of us with kids! As a mom, I love when I can find an educational place to take my kids that’s fun as well. If you feel the same way, you might want to check out Liberty Science Center in Jersey City NJ.

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Liberty Science Center is located in Liberty State Park on the Jersey City bank of the Hudson River, near the Statue of Liberty. This New Jersey science museum is dedicated to bringing the excitement of science and technology to people of all ages. It accomplishes this goal through an impressive assortment of permanent, hands-on interactive displays, the largest planetarium in the United States, massive aquariums, a live animal collection featuring over 100 species, exciting live presentations by science educators that involve lots of audience participation, live Center Stage Science shows, a rotating schedule of entertaining and educational temporary exhibits, and more. A trip to Liberty Science Center has tons of things to do for visitors of all ages. It’s kind of like a visit to a museum, zoo, aquarium, movie theater, and playground all in one! There really is something for everyone here.

Some of the permanent exhibits at Liberty Science Center include:

Skyscraper! Achievement and Impact

Skyscraper! is Liberty Science Center’s largest exhibition. Here, visitors can learn what goes into designing and building skyscrapers. Step out on a narrow steel beam and “walk the steel” 18 feet above the gallery floor (height and weight restrictions apply), discover how buildings behave in high winds in a 20-foot long wind tunnel, participate in an interactive demonstration about how curtain walls (the outer “skin” that wraps around a skyscraper’s frame) are tested while you experience 100 mph hurricane force winds and rain at the Curtain Wall station. Young visitors can put on a safety vest and hard hat as they create their own skyscraper design, discover how elevators work, create an entire neighborhood with building blocks, stack blocks by using a working electromagnetic mini-crane, and load wood chips using an actual mini-excavator.

Eat and Be Eaten

This exhibit features a large variety of live animals, including cotton-top tamarins, a Gila monster, a Goliath Bird-Eating Tarantula, poison dart frogs, hissing cockroaches, puffer fish, a flock of Safron finches, frilled lizards, red-footed tortoises, and more. The exhibit is designed so that small children can get up close to the animals with habitat windows are that are low and shaped so kids can see easily. This exciting exhibit explores predator-prey relationships and examines how animals adapt in amazing ways to survive in the wild.

Our Hudson Home

Our Hudson Home is organized into five zones plus an outdoor deck which overlooks Liberty State Park. The exhibit explores the relationship between humans and nature along the Hudson River. Three of these zones, Our Harbor, Our Wetlands, and Our Hudson River feature aquariums where visitors can view live aquatic and terrestrial organisms that make their homes in these areas. Visitors can also experience what it’s like to operate a cargo crane in the Port of New York and New Jersey, learn how sedimentation, erosion and pollution controls affect the river while experimenting with streams, sand banks and dredging operations on a sedimentation “action table,” slip on a lab coat and conduct mini-experiments in ecology in the working laboratory, and more.

I Explore

In the I Explore exhibit, the youngest visitors to the Liberty Science Center can learn about themselves and their world in a fun, interactive environment as they experiment with simple machines, water play, making music on a “rock xylophone,” and more.

Energy Quest

This newly-reopened exhibit examines how we explore and harness the Earth’s five main sources of energy (Surface, Bio-Stored, Nuclear, Ocean, and Geo-Thermal) and asks the questions… How will we power our futures? How can we balance our ever-growing energy needs with environmental impacts? Ponder these questions and make new discoveries as you take on the roles of geologist, oceanographer, chemical and nuclear engineer at activity-filled, hands-on stations. Visitors can search for oil at the Oil Drilling Station, see how plasma (the superheated ionized gas found on the sun) is shaped as it flows through a vacuum chamber at the Plasma Station created by the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and make a set of wind turbines spin using air tubes.


Liberty Science Center is located within Liberty State Park at 222 Jersey City Boulevard (GPS address: 251 Phillip Street) in Jersey City NJ. Check out their website at www.lsc.org for ticketing options, operating hours, directions, and current information on things to do at the center. General admission to Liberty Science Center is $21.75 for adults and $17.75 for children ages 2-12.

Other things to do in Jersey City NJ & the surrounding area include:

• Liberty State Park
• The Hoboken Historical Museum
• The Hoboken Fire Department Museum
• The Afro-American Historical Museum
• Field Station: Dinosaurs!
  

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