For 40 years now, the New York Transit Museum has sent transportation geeks swooning beneath the streets of Downtown Brooklyn, with a fleet of vintage subway cars and a staggering array of ephemera taking over the decommissioned IND Court Street Station on Schermerhorn Street. It was originally envisioned as only a two-month exhibition, put together by a crew of transit employees as part of the city's American Bicentennial celebration of 1976, but the place proved to be so popular that, four decades later, it's still open for business.
This weekend, in honor of their 40th Anniversary and to thank the community for their support over the decades, the Transit Museum not only threw a block party starring a trio of their vintage buses and a horse named Tonka, but they also opened their, uh, turnstiles with free admission all day long. No hopping required!
The vintage buses—a Fifth Avenue Number 3100, a Blitz Bus Number 5227, and Yellow Coach "Z Type" Double Decker—were familiar to anyone who's been to the Atlantic Antic down at this end of the avenue, but these historic vehicles are always a pleasure to explore. The real bonanza, however, was down in the Transit Museum itself, which is an absolute delight filled with things both ridiculously evocative of whenever your golden age here in NYC may be, as well as many strange and wonderful relics going back to the turn of the 20th century.
Bet they're kicking themselves they didn't preserve a graffiti-covered car or two from the late 1970s though!
The Transit Museum Downtown Brooklyn is located at the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street, and is open Monday through FRiday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and on weekends from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission for adults is $7; kids and seniors get in for $5.
