New York Transit Museum
The New York Transit Museum is a museum in New York City that covers the history of the city's public transportation, with an emphasis on the New York City Subway . It opened in 1976 and is the largest museum of its kind in the United States . The museum is located in downtown Brooklyn on the former Court Street subway station , which was closed in 1946 after barely ten years of operation. In Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan there is a small field office.
The station
Court Street was built as the terminus for local trains on the IND Fulton Street Line and opened on April 9, 1936. The station, equipped with an island platform, was an example of the Independent's operating philosophy . This stated that local trains should, whenever possible, run within the individual city districts and enable connections to express trains, which in turn crossed the city district boundaries. Court Street was intended as the western terminus of the Fulton Street Local (line HH), which should run east to Euclid Avenue . In addition, there were plans to connect the Second Avenue Line in Manhattan to Brooklyn via Court Street.
Operations on the then HH line never started as originally planned. The only trains that ran to Court Street were shuttle services to the neighboring Hoyt-Schermerhorn Streets transfer station . Because of the proximity to other stations in central Brooklyn and the inconvenience of accessibility, Court Street was never heavily used and finally closed on June 1, 1946.
From around 1960 the station served as a backdrop for filming. The best-known film shot here is Stop the Death Ride of Subway 123 from 1974 with Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau in the leading roles.
The museum
As part of the United States' bicentenary, the New York City Transit Exhibit opened on July 4, 1976 at the disused station . There were preserved older subway cars, models and other exhibits. After the celebration, the exhibition should have closed again, but it met with such great interest that it was converted into a permanent museum.
In the mid-1990s, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) took over the museum from the New York City Transit Authority . The MTA expanded the museum's spectrum to other branches of New York's transportation system. On the platform level, only subway cars are shown, but on the distribution level there are changing exhibitions on railways ( Metro-North Railroad , Long Island Railroad ) and bridges ( Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority ).
Individual museum cars that have been serviced, have an overhaul or are not on display, are parked in the Coney Island Complex depot. The museum also has a large number of buses, but there is no permanent exhibition building for them. The buses are housed in various bus depots all over the city and are presented to the public on special occasions, such as B. at the museum's annual “bus festival”.
Web links
Coordinates: 40 ° 41 ′ 24.1 ″ N , 73 ° 59 ′ 25.5 ″ W.