Museum displaying historical artifacts of the New York City Subway, bus, and commuter rail systems in the greater New York City metropolitan region

Overview

The New York Transit Museum (also called the NYC Transit Museum) is a museum that displays historical artifacts of the New York City Subway, bus, and commuter rail systems in the greater New York City metropolitan region. The main museum is located in the decommissioned Court Street subway station in Downtown Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights in Brooklyn. There is a smaller satellite Museum Annex in Grand Central Terminal in Midtown Manhattan. The museum is a self-supporting division of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The museum is located in an actual subway station, which was originally called Court Street. The Court Street station was built as a terminus for local trains of the IND Fulton Street Line and opened on April 9, 1936, along with a long section of the Fulton Street Line and the Rutgers Street Tunnel. The station has one center island platform with two tracks. The tracks end at bumper blocks just beyond the west end of the platform. The station walls feature a tile band set in a course two tiles high (as is the case with most IND local stations), colored aquamarine with a cerulean blue border.

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Exhibits and programs

On July 4, 1976, the New York City Transit Exhibit was opened in the decommissioned underground station as part of the United States Bicentennial celebration, charging a fee of one subway token for admittance. Old subway cars which had been preserved, as well as models and other exhibits were displayed. Plans were to keep the museum open until September 7 of that year, but it proved to be so popular that it remained open and eventually became a permanent museum. On weekends during its initial opening, museum nostalgia trains would run between 57th Street − Sixth Avenue and Rockaway Park, making an intermittent hour-long stop at the exhibit.

In the mid-1990s the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) assumed control of the Transit Museum from the New York City Transit Authority. At that time, the scope of the museum was expanded to include other aspects of transportation services within the MTA region, including commuter rail (Metro-North, Staten Island Railway, Long Island Rail Road) and roads, tunnels, and bridges (MTA Bridges and Tunnels). Since then, rotating exhibits on the mezzanine level frequently highlight commuter railroad and bridge/tunnel operations, as well as their history.

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The museum includes subway, bus, railway, bridge, and tunnel memorabilia; and other exhibits including vintage signage and in-vehicle advertisements; and models and dioramas of subway, bus, and other equipment. A program of lectures, seminars, films, and tours for all ages is offered at the museum. In addition, offsite programs consist of guided tours of MTA facilities, subway stations, artwork and architecture, and New York neighborhoods, as well as opportunities to ride vintage railway and bus equipment.

The museum's mezzanine (upper) level contains the majority of the exhibits, restrooms, water fountains, a gift shop, and a dining space for visitors who have brought their own food or drink (none is for sale onsite). Artifacts from historic subway and bus operations, as well as NYC transportation infrastructure, are on display. The exhibits on the upper level are changed from time to time. In addition, there is a small presentation screening room which usually displays posters and videos for public education about courtesy and safety, including examples from other transit systems around the world.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "New York Transit Museum", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0