The Super Bowl for New York City transportation aficionados returns to the Brooklyn waterfront on Saturday.
The New York Transit Museum will host its annual Bus Festival at Emily Warren Roebling Plaza in Brooklyn Bridge Park from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., rolling out vintage buses that offer kids and fans a rare window into the city’s transit past.
The museum is bringing out a special artifact this year: a bus from 1918, which is the oldest in its collection. Known as Bus 303, the dark-lime green wooden, double-decker motorcoach was once used by the Fifth Avenue Coach Company. It's been restored, and visitors can clamber aboard and sit on its open top level, poke their heads out of its wooden windows and admire the old-school seven-spoke wheel rims.
The 1918 bus could steal the show from Betsy, the 1930-era double-decker bus that’s been the belle of the bus ball in recent years.
Double-decker buses were the norm in the city until the 1950s, when traffic lights moved from the corners of intersections to the center above the street, getting in the way of the tall vehicles.
The Transit Museum has a stacked lineup beyond the double deckers, including “Bus 100,” a 1959 model distinctive for its round “fishbowl” windshield and parallelogram-shaped windows. Transit fans born after the 1970s can see some more familiar models like a “Blitz Bus,” the MTA model featuring a classic blue and white paint job. It was the last type of bus in the city to lack a wheelchair lift.
To mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11 earlier this month, the museum will wheel out a bus nicknamed “Pamela” that was damaged in the World Trade Center attacks. It was restored and put back into service in 2005, and now features American flags and the words “Never Forget” on its side.
“For 50 years, the New York Transit Museum has called a historic subway station home, but our buses are much too big to come inside,” Regina Shepherd, the museum's acting director, said in a statement. “Bus Festival allows us to bring these extraordinary vehicles into the spotlight and welcome the public aboard for a celebration of bus history.”
The event at Brooklyn Bridge Park is free to attend.
