As the crowds attest, the New York Transit Museum’s annual Historic Bus Fair has gotten big, and draws quite a crowd too young to have memories of the older buses on display
But perhaps the event was as much a chance of a younger generation acquiring nostalgia while we older ones experienced our own. In any case, it was great to see parents and kids coming out for transit!
Not all nostalgia, of course: Bus #5000 is the New York City Transit Authority’s latest model, just rolling out on the streets now, and when the buses aren’t rolling, there is this immense special-build tow truck to bring them home. It, too, is brand-new, weighs 50 tons, and is capable of hauling even the 62-foot articulated models.
This GM-built model was the “new bus” that came into service in the 1950s, when I was a young teen—but it wasn’t until a few years later that they were retro-fitted with probably the biggest advance in public transportation of the time: Air conditioning. Notice the compressor fans mounted on top.
Period-appropriate car-card ads in the bus gave the exhibit a little extra bit of fun—even though I wondered if the “Bet you do better in a hat” is real or a parody! Turns out to be real, although from the late 40s, and—no surprise—it’s quoting a distorted statistic!
The oldest old-timer on display had the longest line—more than two city blocks when we joined the queue. It’s a 1931 double-decker built by Yellow Coach on a GM chassis. After a 16-year career on Fifth Avenue, it left home for continued service in Nevada, Alaska and Toronto before arriving at the museum in 2004.
Fun to sit in, but sadly the upper deck was off limits. In my childhood, I rode on the next generation of double-deckers on Fifth Avenue before they were discontinued in the 1950s.
The fair took place at a section of Brooklyn Bridge Park, between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges (really more or less under the Brooklyn Bridge). On hand a bit further away, near the Park’s carousel, was the Pillsbury Doughboy; not a clue whether he was there to enjoy the buses.
This two-tone color scheme from the 1950s said “Brooklyn” to those of us who grew up with Manhattan’s green-and-cream Fifth Avenue Coach buses and the red-and-white scheme of the Surface Transit buses that ran on Broadway (and other routes of course). By the 1970s, when the companies were combined, along with Brooklyn’s buses, under city ownership, all those schemes gave way to the blue two-tone of this 1970’s GM New Look bus…
and their eventual successors with a white-and-blue-accent scheme. Some of us wondered who had the paint contract… One thing you won’t see on today’s buses was the Exact Fare sign; today the buses take payment by digital fare cards, contactless credit and debit cards and yes, they still take cash. The big difference is that starting January 1st, the fare is going up to $3.
The Transit Authority is also responsible for another class of vehicle, available for regular fare to people with disabilities that keep them from using the regular bus and subway services. Officially described as ‘para-transit,’ the New York version is called Access-A-Ride. At the bus fair, two of the accessible vehicles, which have wheelchair lifts and ramps, were on display. Number 6238 is built on a Ford Transit electric chassis.
The Transit Museum’s buses are on display only for special events, but the Museum’s permanent site in a former station in Downtown Brooklyn has a wide range of exhibits and dozens of subway cars on display. For more information, click HERE; for a TravelGumbo blog on the Museum, click HERE
