What there is to know
- The New York Transit Museum Bus Festival, featuring vintage buses, will take place June 10 at Emily Warren Roebling Plaza in Brooklyn Bridge Park.
- The event, which is completely free and will take place rain or shine, will allow visitors to explore buses from a vintage fleet, representing more than 90 years of transit history in the Big Apple.
- The festival will take place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with last entry at 3:30 p.m.
NEW YORK — A festival perfect for history and traffic buffs will return this summer.
The New York Transit Museum Bus Festival, featuring vintage buses, will take place June 10 at Emily Warren Roebling Plaza in Brooklyn Bridge Park.
The event, which is completely free and will take place rain or shine, will allow visitors to explore buses from a vintage fleet, representing more than 90 years of transit history in the Big Apple. The festival will take place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with last entry at 3:30 p.m.
Which vehicles will be seen at the festival? According to the museum, there will be a number of vintage buses that will be on site. Among them there will be:
- Among the vintage fleet, visitors can board the oldest bus in the museum’s fleet: “Betsy”, a double-decker bus from 1931. “Betsy”. or the #1263 bus, it was part of Fifth Avenue Coach’s “1200 series”. The 1200 series buses were among the last front-engine double-decker buses built by Yellow Coach. In 1936 the company introduced a new rear-engined design. However, bus #1263 remained in service until 1947. Fifth Avenue Coach ended all double-decker bus operations in 1953.
- Another bus in the fleet is connected to a classic sitcom that aired in the golden age of television. Designed exclusively for New York City, the #2969 bus (1948) was one of the first 40-foot-long transit buses. It has a double-wide entry door to speed up the loading and unloading of passengers. It is also known as the “Jackie Gleason bus” because it was renumbered to match the bus the comedian was photographed on as a character in the 1950s series “The Honeymooners”.
- The ubiquitous white and blue MTA buses with curved windshields that crisscrossed the city from 1979 to 2019 will also be part of the festival. How frequent were these buses? At one point they ran on almost every route (about nearly 5,000 streets) until they were retired. Bus #5249, from 1979, was one of the last diesel buses in the MTA fleet and the last RTS bus built for the MTA.
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