| Edification value |  |
|---|---|
| Entertainment value |  |
| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 113 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned | The Transit Museum could rebrand itself as a museum of advertising. Not only have they lovingly preserved subway cars from the past century, they have kept the ads intact as well. Each constitutes a hilarious Madison Avenue time capsule. Remember when wine cost 98c per quart? I sure don’t. |
The Transit Museum is one of only a few New York City museums not housed in a building. Instead, the city established it in a disused subway station in downtown Brooklyn.
Along with its satellite location in Grand Central Station, this museum features a series of exhibits covering the construction of the subway system, how the transit system responds to disasters, the construction of the Second Avenue Subway, and above-ground transport in New York, from horse trolleys to modern buses.
Trainspotting
But the real heart of the Transit Museum resides downstairs on the subway platform. There, you can visit lovingly restored El and subway cars from every era of the transit system’s evolution. Marvel at these steel boxes, with their incandescent lights, exposed fans, rattan seats, and hanging hold-straps. About the only historic subway feature not documented is the graffiti. I suppose not enough time has passed… The MTA can’t wax nostalgic about tagged trains, at least not yet. And it certainly doesn’t want to encourage anyone.
If you have ever felt curiosity about the history of the turnstile, this museum can scratch that itch. It features examples ranging from the manually operated days through modern, automated, swipe-your-metrocard marvels. Most interesting to me was the large size, un-jump-able rotating cage, affectionately(?) referred to as an “Iron Maiden.” Apparently people sometimes got trapped in those things — horrors!
A history of the subway token half-tells the story of Silvester Dubosz, the city comptroller who in the 1980s surreptitiously had his initials carved into the token design. Unlike City Reliquary, where I first heard that story, the Transit Museum doesn’t mention he got sacked for his ego. They also display a whole board of slugs and counterfeit tokens.
The Downside: Kids Galore
The Transit Museum stands as one of the noisiest museums I’ve visited so far, packed with kids (including a whole birthday party) on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Can’t hold that against it; I’ve never known a kid who doesn’t love trains, and the museum caters to that audience. Though as for modern parents’ inability to keep their kids under control and well-behaved in public…well, that’s a subject for another blog. Still, if you’re kidless, you might consider visiting on a weekday.
More than History
The Transit Museum tells the story of the city’s circulatory system — New York literally could not exist without it. I appreciate that they focus not just on the building of the system and nostalgic old trains, but also on what it will require to keep it functioning in a world of really bad weather and really bad people. The crisis exhibit looked in turn at rebuilding after 9/11, Irene, and Sandy, as well as the blackout of 2003.
Despite the challenges of modern times, the Transit Museum nonetheless also makes me thankful that I live today. While paying 98c for a quart of wine appeals to me, I can’t imagine commuting in one of those incredibly smelly, sweaty, pre-AC subway cars, dressed in a three-piece suit, with only whirring fans to move the muggy air around. I sometimes think the “Greatest Generation” gets overly lauded, but commuters back then were made of sterner stuff than I, for sure.
A Frustrated Reviewer
The Transit Museum fulfills its mission extremely well. It covers the things you’d expect a transit museum to, but holds surprises as well. Although kid-oriented and very kid-friendly, it also presents topics for grown-ups to delve into as well. As I re-read this entry, I feel frustrated because I want to write so much more. Some highlights:
- The story of Granville Woods. As the inventor of the “third rail” power system, he birthed a metaphor.
- As a trivia buff, I loved learning that on December 23, 1946, 8,872,244 people used the subway and elevated trains– a record that stands to this day.
- I also love Mayor Lindsay’s 1972 quote about the Second Avenue Subway line (proposed in 1919, it finally opened at the end of 2016): “We know that whatever is said about this project in the years to come, certainly no one can say that the city acted rashly or without due deliberation.”
- And there’s the wall of trolleys at the Dr. George T. F. Rahilly Trolley and Bus Study Center.
Like the treasures of the Fire Museum, the Transit Museum presents and interprets artifacts no other institution can replicate. Anyone with kids in the city should take them. And anyone who cares about New York history, or transportation and transit, should consider this Brooklyn hole in the ground a must-visit museum.
For Reference:
| Address | Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Streets, Underground, Brooklyn |
|---|---|
| Website | nytransitmuseum.org |
| Cost | General Admission: $10 |
A family tree shows how the Revolution divided families between loyalists and revolutionaries. It also names some of the slaves who worked for the Vechte family, though of course no one bothered to record how they felt about independence, or anything else about their thoughts and beliefs. Still, I like that they don’t sweep the Vechte’s slaves under the historic rug. Another brief display on slavery observes how surprisingly prevalent it was in revolutionary Brooklyn. One in three Kings County residents was a slave, and half of Dutch households owned them.
The mansion’s vast land holdings at one point stretched the (albeit pretty narrow that far north) width of Manhattan. All that land is now Washington Heights, of course. And yet, its commanding hilltop location, surrounded by tiny, lovely Roger Morris Park, offers a taste of the country to this day. The grounds burst with rosebushes and even include a small sunken garden. I could easily see going back just to sit there and read a book.
A juxtaposition of two pieces: My Egypt, by Charles Demuth, and Pittsburgh, by Elsie Driggs. Both from 1927, they present similar and yet extremely divergent visions of industrialized landscapes. One is clearly prettier than the other, and yet, as Driggs said of her grey smokestacks and pipes, “This shouldn’t be beautiful. But it is.”
BLDG 92 is the vowel-challenged, fascinating, historical center of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It tells the story of the Navy Yard through artifacts, an interactive tabletop, and a comprehensive timeline. 
Kaisik Wong’s spacey, glam 1970s fashions look like costumes from a very trippy sci-fi film. The opposite of most of the counterculture fashion on display, and yet they fit in somehow, too.
New York City is lucky to boast not one but two extremely fine design museums — the Museum of Arts and Design and the 
The publisher Harper Brothers proposed to seal Mark Twain’s memoirs until 2000. Then they would be published by subscription (quoting the exhibit’s text) “in whatever mode should then be prevalent, that is by printing as at present, or by use of phonographic cylinders, or by electrical methods or by any other method which may then be in use.” The show has Twain’s 1900 letter agreeing to these terms. No doubt he didn’t want his meeting with the crew of the Starship Enterprise to mess with the timeline too much.
The Harper brothers started out as printers, but with their 1817 publication of an edition of Seneca’s Morals, they launched one of the most famous publishing concerns in American history.
The octagonal gallery had an exhibit documenting the history of gay student life at Columbia, from the time when homosexuality violated the law, through the AIDS crisis, to today. I’m proud to say Columbia was home to the first gay student group on a college campus — the Student Homophile League — dating to 1967. Second most interesting thing I learned there.
Maxine Henryson’s beautiful, long, accordion-folded photobooks. Stretched out on a table, they reward much slow, close viewing.
I’m not sure Art in General belongs on a list of museums. It’s really an art gallery (in the sense of a place to buy art), albeit a nonprofit one. I’ve been giving nonprofits a pass so far, so there I went.
When they laid the cornerstone for the Music Hall, Andrew Carnegie himself said that “here all good causes may find a platform.” Remarkably, that statement evolved into a policy of openness to anyone who wanted to take the stage (and could afford to rent it). So even in times when many venues were closed to, say, African American performers, Carnegie was open.
The Rose Museum is a small space telling the story of Carnegie Hall, twice actually: once from a building/Carnegie perspective, the other more from an artistic perspective. But they run together and get a little redundant. It is indeed between the auditorium and the First Tier restrooms, as well as the patrons’ lounge.
