Review Date: October 29th, 2012

The Peoria Riverfront Museum is the spiritual successor to the Lakeview Museum.

The Lakeview Museum is a place that I cherished due to going there often as a kid. When they announced it was closing and they were going to build a new museum on the riverfront, I was excited and sad. Excited to see this new place yet sad at the closing of a childhood memory.

Matt, Erin, and I decided to check it out as it was too late in the day to travel far but still early enough to see some sights. As we approached the counter and paid, I was super surprised at the cost to get in. I want to say it was around $15-18 a person. The museum was new, big and exciting so I was expecting a fee to get in but not that steep of one. Regardless of that, we paid and went about exploring.

At the time of our visit, it was fairly empty so we had the entire place to ourselves. The first thing I got distracted by was this giant circulating thing hanging from the rafters. It was blue and slowly spinning. The thing was mesmerizing to watch. Erin and Matt had to remind me we had the rest of the museum to explore, so I finally looked away and we started walking around.

Up first was a Caterpillar exhibit. The company Caterpillar is a huge part of the identity of Central Illinois. It’s also one that I don’t have much interest in. I grew up around people that worked for Cat, around Cat’s production facilities and even worked for a company that worked for Cat for a few years after high school. I can say that I have had sufficient Caterpillar information in my life, so beyond seeing some of the displays, there was no interest in any of us on the overall showing.

We moved on to some art hanging on the walls and a few other odds and ends to look at. At a certain point, I think we went down one level and encountered a kids and teens area. This was the REALLY interactive part of the museum. The stuff I like. We came across a lot of fun machines to play around with. One of them was a pitching machine that would measure your throwing speed. Another was an arm wrestling machine. If I remember right, you could set the resistance and try to force the metal arm down. You can see a glimpse of that in the photos below. We moved on from those and encountered some other things to play with but they were meant for little kids so we were too big for them.

After that, we left. We spent maybe an hour here? I remember leaving and thinking… that’s it? I do feel like we missed something. There is a planetarium in the museum but after paying the hefty fee to get in, we were kind of strapped for cash and we weren’t sure if they were showing anything at the time of our visit.

I would love to return as they have a revolving main exhibit that always seems interesting. They had a Lego one at some point but I couldn’t find anyone else that liked Legos enough to go check it out. I really do think we came at a time when there wasn’t a big exhibit going on and we only got to experience half of what the museum has to offer.