New York Transit Museum's Holiday Train And Bus Show Showcases Vintage Toy Buses

NEW YORK CITY

:Picture, if you will, Manhattan's tony Fifth Avenue filled with people bustling around shops, offices and residential highrises; the street overflowing with cars and buses making their way along the crowded thoroughfare. Now take yourself back to the turn of the Twentieth Century when the overflow in the street was filled more with pushcarts and pedestrians than cars, and the omnibuses were drawn by horses. Not even elevated trains or trolleys were permitted down this fashionable avenue due to influential residents who scoffed at unsightly overhead wiring and ugly rails imbedded in the road. But change was brewing, and in the summer of 1905 New York City introduced the very first motorized bus, which would redefine the landscape, not only of Fifth Avenue but also of all city streets forever.

As part of the New York Transit Museum's centennial celebration of the motorized bus, it is showcasing vintage toy buses in its Grand Central Holiday Train and Bus Show. Located in the New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex in Grand Central Terminal, an impressively historic location in itself, the exhibit will run through the holidays until January 16.

Fifty-five toy buses from the collections of John Dockendorf and Kurt Resch will be on display, along with vintage and modern day model trains, sponsored, in part, by Lionel. "The buses are a little overlooked and they're really wonderful toys. I think toy collectors are really going to enjoy this show in that respect," says Rob Delbagno, manager of exhibitions at the New York Transit Museum.

While past holiday exhibitions in the Grand Central space have focused on toy trains, Delbagno took great care in choosing just the right pieces to make sure the motorized bus was not overlooked in its special centennial year. "Anything that was a New York-specific bus caught our eye immediately, so we definitely leaned in that direction. We favored American-made toys over other buses but not exclusively, and we tried to get a cross section over time," notes Delbagno.

In keeping with the New York theme, a particular favorite of collector Resch is his Lincoln Tunnel toy. "It's a tin windup that was made in Newark in the 1930s. It's got New Jersey on one side with farms on the lithography, and it's got New York City on the other side. It's not enclosed, but the trucks and cars and buses go in one side and come out the other," says Resch. Manufactured by Unique Art Manufacturing Company (later bought by Marx Toys), the Lincoln Tunnel can be dated by the pudgy policeman towering over the tiny vehicles, whereas later versions had a thinner cop.

The exhibition features a horizontal display case acting as a timeline of toy buses showing the differences of the toy bus eras. According to Delbagno, "You can see three different shapes up to the present. The 20s all had a very distinct shape, and then the big change occurred in the 30s when everything started to go streamline and then they kind of pop back into a boxier form after World War II and they haven't really changed all that much."