This Rochester attraction is a winner of the 2024 USA TODAY 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards
The Strong National Museum of Play has been recognized as one of the nation's best pop culture museums in the 2024 USA Today 10Best Readers' Choice Awards.
The Readers' Choice Awards highlight the very best in travel, food and drink and lifestyle. Every week, USA TODAY 10Best invites a panel of industry experts to nominate their favorite points of interest and attractions across a wide range of categories.
Where did Strong National Museum of Play land on the list?
The Strong landed third on the list for USA Today's 10Best pop culture museums in the United States.
Strong National Museum of Play 'highly interactive'
The listicle described the Strong as a "highly interactive" children's museum in Rochester. The museum last year unveiled its 90,000-square-foot expansion, that involved five years of construction, a timeline lengthened by the coronavirus pandemic, and cost $75 million.
Among the eye-popping additions are the ESL Digital Worlds: Level Up, which allows guests to become the main character in a life-size video game; a 20-foot-high Donkey Kong arcade game; and a soaring new space for the World Video Game Hall of Fame.
It also includes the 17,000-square-foot Hasbro Game Park, a colorful outdoor play area with a ridable Game of Life spinner, massive monopoly tokens, a Jenga-themed climbing area and a five-headed dragon from Dungeons & Dragons can breathe mist and fire with the touch of a button.
Outside near the museum’s new entrance, dubbed the Portal of Play, is the final piece of the expansion puzzle: a 20-ton granite ball that floats via hydrostatic pressure on a thin film of water and can be spun with a quick swipe.
Other permanent attractions at the museum include the Wegmans Super Kids Market, Sesame Street, Field of Play, the carousel and train, Play Lab, Skyline Climb, Butterfly Garden, Toy Hall of Fame and Reading Adventureland.
Through mid-May, a Barbie exhibit encourages children to "be anything" as they learn about careers, professions and some remarkable role models who broke barriers as pioneers.
USA Today's 10Best pop culture museums
The 10 museums were selected by a panel of industry experts and the order was determined by readers. Here's the full list and rankings:
Mascot Hall of Fame in Whiting, Indiana
Comic-Con Museum in San Diego, California
Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York
Charles M. Schultz Museum in Santa Rosa, California
American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio
OZ Museum in Wamego, Kansas
Doo Wop Experience Museum in Wildwood, New Jersey
Rancho Obi-Wan in Petaluma, California
Neon Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada
Museum of Broadway in New York City, New York
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Strong Museum of Play wins a 2024 USA TODAY 10Best Readers’ Choice Award