The entrance to the New York Transit Museum looks like a typical subway station stairway. But instead of servicing harried commuters, this 60,000-square-foot facility houses an impressive display of transit history artifacts: everything from token to turnstiles -- not to mention about twenty historic subway cars.
After paying your entrance fee at the token booth, you enter the surprisingly odor-free museum through "Steel, Stone and Backbone," an exhibit about subway construction. Kids race on through; they don't care much about "boring" and "shoring" -- they want to get to the good stuff...the platform level! There you can board a display of vintage train cars, adorned with period replica advertisements for such products as Rinso, Burma Shave, and Oysterettes.
There are cane-seated, wood-clad examples from the early 1900s; gunmetal-hued, heavy duty behemoths of the sixties (amazingly sans graffiti!); and our favorite: the modern, streamlined R-11 Prototype (designed in 1949 in anticipation of the construction of the Second Avenue Subway...they're still working on that one!).
The decade-hopping is enjoyable, but proceed with caution! There are multiple signs warning you to stay off the tracks; this is a decommissioned but still operational station and the third rail is live.
Back up on the main level, the most entertaining displays involve cash, like the section about money room operations. A mannequin station agent seems dazed by the shiny sorting machines and piles of fake currency.
There's also a collection of imaginative "slugs" -- worthless little objects intended to be recognized as tokens by turnstiles in those pre-Metrocard days (We admit it, we're nostalgic for token suckers as well).
And there's always a crush of kids wanting to steer the full-size, cut-a-way bus. It doesn't go anywhere, not unlike the M34 during rush hour. [ADB]
