Hundreds of bus enthusiasts of all ages came out to Brooklyn Bridge Park on Saturday to take a trip through the past.<\/p>\n
The 29th annual Bus Festival is hosted by the New York Transit Museum. This year’s showpiece: a bus from 1918, which took years to restore.<\/p>\n
“It took them three years to get this bus into the state that you see it in now, and it is gorgeous,” said Jodi Shapiro, the curator of the New York Transit Museum. “It looks almost exactly the way that it did in 1917, 1918, when it was built.”<\/p>\n
“It’s really a piece of art on wheels,” she added.<\/p>\n
An open-top double-decker bus, which operated in the city until 1930, served Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street crosstown routes. To start it up, the driver doesn’t turn a key; instead, it has to be cranked by hand.<\/p>\n
The historic bus has wood detailing, as well as a wooden steering wheel. There are vintage ads inside, similar to what you would have seen running in these buses back in 1918.<\/p>\n
“She’s resurrected, she’s back,” said Josef Roberts, a bus maintainer with the New York City Transit Authority, when asked about the 1918 bus.<\/p>\n
Roberts said he looks forward to the event every year.<\/p>\n
“We love to bring the buses out here, and we love the people,” he said.<\/p>\n
Alyssa Janiak and her 1-year-old son Jack from Crown Heights were checking out a bus from 1956, which was the first air-conditioned transit bus in the city.<\/p>\n
“It’s amazing that it’s still here, that the city has really invested in taking care of it, all of these pieces, and then, to show them for free I think is really cool,” said Janiak. “It gives a lot of New Yorkers something to do, and it’s different, it’s not here all the time, so I think it’s a real cool way to see a piece of the city’s history.”<\/p>\n
There’s also a double-decker bus, from 1931, nicknamed “Betsy,” which used to be the oldest in the museum’s vintage fleet until the 1918 bus was restored. All nine buses from the museum’s fleet showcased more than 100 years of bus history.<\/p>\n
“I love it, it’s great, it’s fantastic,” said Steve Henshaw, a bus enthusiastic from Connecticut who attended the event for the first time.<\/p>\n
“I just like being able to go into the old buses and relive my childhood riding some of these,” he said. “The RTS [Rapid Transit Series] over there, the Jamaica Bus, that’s probably my favorite one because that’s the one I rode on most as a kid.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hundreds of bus enthusiasts of all ages came out to Brooklyn Bridge Park on Saturday to take a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":351327,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[2296,25,98,100,99,231,9,24,12,6019,63,27],"class_list":["post-351326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-app-human-interest","tag-app-top-stories","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-human-interest","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-news","tag-noorulain-khawaja","tag-nyc","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/351327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}