Big Apple history buffs got a rare glimpse inside the buses that moved New Yorkers during the 20th century at the New York Transit Museum’s annual bus festival Sunday afternoon.
The quirky display at Brooklyn Bridge Park had everything from double-decker behemoths to tour-terrain mobiles as attendees got the chance for intimate walk-throughs of six of the more than 30 buses in the museum’s collection.
“I think that, especially for a kid, subways and buses are these magical things,” museum curator Jodi Shapiro told The Post, adding that the event has drawn thousands of supporters for more than two decades.
“When I was a little kid waiting for the bus and it’s bigger than my parents car there’s lots of people and it goes to places that we normally wouldn’t go,” she added. “There’s so many books, songs about [buses] … and they just look really cool.”
The star of Sunday’s show was “Betsy,” a double-decker coach bus that transported commuters along Fifth Avenue from 1931 to 1947 — and lured dozens of transit fans to a queue wrapping the block at the bus festival.
Despite the double-decker’s ability to hold more passengers than a standard bus at the time, Betsy was decommissioned after just 15 years due to the cost of paying both a conductor and a driver, and efforts to bring back the two-tiered system in the 1970s were met with challenges like low-hanging traffic lights, the curator said.
Betsy was sold in 1961 and had brief tenures in Nevada, Alaska and even Toronto before she was brought back to New York as part of the museum’s collection — most of which is stored in a Bronx bus depot.
“Now that we have accordion buses, those can hold almost as many people,” Shapiro said, though “they’re not as charming as double decker buses.”
Festival attendees – ranging from truck-loving tots to octogenarians – gushed over the array of more than a half-dozen vehicles on display, from a 2016 Ford F750 tunnel-scrubber truck to a green-and-yellow bus from the 1950s that served as the first air-conditioned bus model in the US when it debuted on Fifth Avenue.
“I like buses, especially old buses, old trains, old cars,” said 81-year-old Brooklynite Paul Haymont. “Nobody’s putting the new ones in a museum.”
“It’s really cool,” said 6-year-old James, sporting a MTA-map tee shirt, because “one bus made my dad think he was back in the 80s.”
Other standouts from the fete included a 1970s-era bus from General Motors’ “New Look” fleet — sporting a 1993 “Made In America” movie poster — as well as a swanky electric blue1969 Flxible Corporation bus, which served boroughs of the Bronx and Staten Island due to the fleet’s ability to traverse steep hills.
Shapiro noted there are a “few more” buses in the collection being restored right now, including several from the 1940s and 50s, as well as one double-decker bus from 1917 that’s taken more than three years to bring back to life.
“Usually when a type of bus or subway car is ready to retire we start talking with the Department of Subways or Buses about preservation,” she said, adding the museum already has stock of the famed orange subway cars set to be phased out this year.
“Things that are sort of different and rare, we always try very hard to preserve,” the curator added.
“Seeing the way the colors change, the way the seating arrangements change, the advertisements change: it’s just a fun way to go back in time without a time machine.”
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