Adventure Aquarium

About Adventure Aquarium

The Adventure Aquarium, formerly the New Jersey State Aquarium, is a for-profit educational entertainment attraction operated in Camden, New Jersey on the Delaware River waterfront by the Herschend Family Entertainment Corporation. It originally debuted in 1992, and re-opened in its current form on May 25, 2005, featuring approximately eight thousand animals living in varied forms of semi-aquatic, freshwater, and marine habitats. The facility has a total tankage volume of over two million gallons, and public floor space that covers nearly 200,000 square feet (19,000 m2).

For twelve years prior to the Aquarium's reopening, the building was known as the New Jersey State Aquarium at Camden, and was operated by the non-profit New Jersey Academy for Aquatic Sciences, an organization chartered specifically for the purpose of running the Aquarium and furthering its original mission of education and conservation of the marine environment. The Academy was created in 1989, and oversaw the design and construction of the original attraction jointly with the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority — the government-run group that allocates public funding for sports and entertainment attractions, statewide. Inspired by the success that other cities, particularly Baltimore, had experienced with their own marine life centers, the New Jersey Legislature approved the bill that included the Aquarium's construction order in the late 1980s, and Governor of New Jersey Thomas Kean signed it into law. Ground was broken on a desolate stretch of the dilapidated Camden Waterfront in the fall of 1988.

The original building was designed by the architectural firm The Hillier Group, and became a gleaming centerpiece for a dull and virtually abandoned area. Constructed primarily of cast concrete, accented by large glass and aluminum facades and topped by a large, white fabric dome, the Aquarium was completed by early 1992, with a total cost of about $52 million. It opened on February 29, 1992.