New York Transit Museum

Useful Information

Location:	99 Schermerhorn St, Brooklyn, NY 11201. Main entrance: Schermerhorn Street at Boerum Place. Wheelchair-accessible entrance: Schermerhorn Street at Court Street. (40.6905176, -73.9899802)
Open:	All year Thu-Sun 10-16. [2024]
Fee:	Adults USD 10, Children (2-17) USD 5, Seniors (62+) USD 5, Disabled USD 5, Museum Members free. [2024]
Classification:	Underground Railway Underground Museum
Light:	Incandescent
Dimension:
Guided tours:
Photography:	allowed, no tripods, selfie sticks or drones
Accessibility:	yes
Bibliography:
Address:	New York Transit Museum, 99 Schermerhorn St, Brooklyn, NY 11201, Tel: +1-718-694-1600. E-mail:
As far as we know this information was accurate when it was published (see years in brackets), but may have changed since then. Please check rates and details directly with the companies in question if you need more recent info.

History

1936	Court Street subway station opened.
01-JUN-1946	Court Street subway station decommissioned.
1949	filming location of the film Guilty Bystander.
1956	filming location for a scene of The FBI Story, posing as the Bowling Green station.
1961	plans to convert the abandoned station into a bowling alley not carried out.
04-JUL-1976	New York Transit Museum opened to the public.

Description

New York Transit Museum is located inside a decommissioned subway station. So you actually go down the subway station staircase to reach the entrance. The museum has exhibitions on the history of the public transport in the city, with emphasis on the subway and the elevated train. The latter is a specialty of some U.S. cities, where long bridges were built above the road to handle public transport above the still existing road. There are several photo exhibitions, and also some 20 original cars of the old subway lines on the tracks in the subway station, forming an exhibition which is named Moving the Millions. The exhibition Steel, Stone & Backbone gives an insight into the construction methods and labor required to build the city’s first subway. Another topic is transport systems on the road since the 19th century, an exhibition named On the Streets: New York’s Trolleys and Buses. Rather weird is the collection of historic way-finding and platform etiquette signage, which is dubbed No Spitting on the Platform.

The mission of the New York Transit Museum is to collect, exhibit, inter photographs, posters, maps, and artifactspret and preserve all aspects of the public transportation systems in the New York metropolitan region. This is a pretty wide spectrum, and includes the preservation of photographs, maps, and artifacts, which can be viewed in the museum and on their website. But they also preserve all kinds of vehicles, including a fleet of vintage buses and other surface vehicles. Around the holidays, the museum offers Holiday Nostalgia Rides.

The station was used as a filming location since the 1950s. In some years, between 10 and 25 films were filmed here. The most prominent is probably The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) with Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau. Even after the museum had been opened here, the station was used as a filming location. When the museum was opened on 04-JUL-1976, on occasion of the Bicentennial of the United States, it charged a fee of one subway token for admittance. And museum nostalgia trains between 57th Street−Sixth Avenue and Rockaway Park made a 1 h stop at the museum. The exhibition should have been closed at the end of the celebration, but it was so popular that it was turned into a permanent museum. In the 1990s, the museum was transferred from the New York City Transit Authority to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). The museum was massively extended, and other aspects of transportation services were included.