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05 Dec 2005 / 0 Comment

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

Published: December 5, 2005

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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.

Jackie Gleason Away We Go Honeymooners Special bus This tin toy from 1955 also came with a bus drivers uniform to coincide with the popular television series The Honeymooners

Jackie Gleason “Away We Go Honeymooners Special” bus. This tin toy from 1955 also came with a bus driver’s uniform to coincide with the popular television series The Honeymooners.

In keeping with the New York theme, a particular favorite ofcollector Resch is his Lincoln Tunnel toy. “It’s a tin windup thatwas made in Newark in the 1930s. It’s got New Jersey on one sidewith farms on the lithography, and it’s got New York City on theother side. It’s not enclosed, but the trucks and cars and buses goin one side and come out the other,” says Resch. Manufactured byUnique Art Manufacturing Company (later bought by Marx Toys), theLincoln Tunnel can be dated by the pudgy policeman towering overthe 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.”

Pickwick Night Coach cast iron circa 1920 made by Kenton The bus was produced in various sizes and different forms

Pickwick Night Coach, cast iron, circa 1920, made by Kenton. The bus was produced in various sizes and different forms.

One of the more fascinating pieces that Resch has loaned tothis exhibit is the Radicon Bus made by Modern Toys, in Japan,1960. “They bill it as the world’s first complete remote controltoy, and I found it complete in its box. It’s the American versionof it, so the box is in English with this blond boy on the cover,but when you open up the manual inside, everything is in Japanese,so you can’t understand the instructions. It’s got this big remotewith a tall antenna that you put onto the roof of the bus. It’s afunny piece; it reminds me of watching a TV show from 1960,” saysResch.

The pieces in the collection also serve to represent a historical perspective of the materials used to make toys throughout the various decades represented among the buses. As collector Dockendorf explains, “There’s a mixture of different types. Some of the real older ones are pressed steel; they’re kind of heavy, they’re a little bit crude and then some of them are cast iron, which is probably the most common type of toy in the 20s – that was before plastic came along. Half a dozen are tin, but they’re US tin.

“After the war, virtually everything tin was made in Japan. Because the Japanese imports were so cheap they kind of drove most of the US toy companies out of business. But prior to World War II there really was not any trade with Japan of any consequence, so these are US tin toys mostly of the 20s and 30s. They’re very light, they’re very artistic, there’s more shape,” says Dockendorf. “The cast iron toys are kind of crude; they don’t have all the lines and designs quite like the tin. The cast iron are probably the more popular because they were more durable; the tins are much more fragile,” he said.

Cannonball Express made of tin by Upton toys circa 1920s

Cannonball Express, made of tin by Upton toys, circa 1920s.

One of the tin toy buses featured, however, is postwar tin -a more durable tin than the fragile prewar ones and a particularfavorite of Dockendorf’s. “The Jackie Gleason Honeymoonersbus from the 1950s was made as a toy to help celebrate thepopularity of the show. I’m partial to that because it representsan actual event, the TV show and the personality,” he said. “Theother buses, by and large, don’t have that type of connection. It’scute and it’s colorful and fun to see, but it’s really nothing likeany bus that ever operated in the streets of New York. The lithohas paintings that are approximate to the characters, but it’sprobably The Honeymooners and the Jackie Gleason letteringmore than anything that singles it out.”

While the buses hold a revered place in this show, the trains maintain their customary legendary status for the holidays. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Lionel’s newly created 34-foot-long “O” gauge train layout. It features model trains running on eight separate loop tracks through a holiday scene that begins in a living room on Christmas morning then travels through a miniature New York City, past suburbs, farmland and on to the North Pole.

“Those trains and that layout are really pop cultural contemporary art, and what it evokes in people is almost spiritual. People get tears in their eyes because they remember the first time they saw a set like that or when they were kids and they got it as a gift,” observes Jerry Calabrese, president of Lionel Trains.

In addition to the working holiday train layout, vintage Lionel model trains from the New York Transit Museum’s Lawrence Scripps Wilkinson collection are on display. Included is a New Jersey Central Railroad “Blue Comet,” a “De Luxe Express” passenger train and two Commodore Vanderbilt trains, one called “The Blue Streak,” a toy version of the actual train introduced on the New York Central line in 1934.

This New York Central line Commodore Vanderbilt by The Lionel Corporation in 1935 is based on the design of the first American streamlined steam locomotive which was built in 1934

This New York Central line Commodore Vanderbilt by The Lionel Corporation in 1935 is based on the design of the first American streamlined steam locomotive, which was built in 1934.

According to Wilkinson, “The real Commodore Vanderbilt wasthe first streamlined steam locomotive in the United States and itushered in the era of streamlining on the American railroads. Therewas only one ever built. It was created in conjunction with the ArtDeco movement and it pulled the old-style cars. When they saw thatit was so popular and that people would crowd around to see thisnew locomotive, they commissioned to have the other cars builtstreamlined as well.

“But the toy guys, they really went wild for this design, so Lionel introduced a toy version of it. This was during the Depression and Lionel recognized that it was cheaper to build a toy version since it could be stamped in one piece. The Blue Streak toy locomotive looks pretty much like the real one, but the real ones were never blue. Lionel sold thousands of Blue Streaks, and it really helped the company to come back financially,” says Wilkinson.

The buses, however, are getting the red carpet treatment, and for Delbagno there are small treasures on exhibit. “My favorite is a tiny little guy called Futuristic Bus – streamlined, sort of bubble shape, very Buck Rogers-looking. It’s very telltale of that particular time period, 1940. The Depression had been going on for ten years, the country had just gone to war; it was a very tough time and science fiction was really big.

“Even though it was a tough time, there was still a lot of optimism, and this is what the ’39 World’s Fair was all about – progress and the future. We were going to find solutions to all of our problems and they were imagining buses that would go to Mars. This one little bus, if you look at it closely, is part bus, part space ship; it comes out of that whole thinking. There’s a lot you can tell about the time period from the piece,” says Delbagno.

The 1939 New York World’s Fair is represented through two pieces made by Arcade. One looks like a trolley but it is indeed a bus, a replica of those used to transport people around the fair. As Resch notes, “Arcade was a great toy company, which started in the 1880s. They made cast iron toys and most of the cast iron toy companies went out of business at the beginning of World War II because they couldn’t find the metals anymore. But they made these cast iron pieces for the ’39 New York World’s Fair. The trolley piece actually came in three sizes; the biggest one was over a foot long.”

Putting together a vintage toy exhibition is no easy feat when one considers toy-making history. The tendency to lean toward older pieces, which inevitably look more interesting than newer ones, makes it a daunting task, as Delbagno well knows. “Because we were thinking only of motorized buses for this show, while the first toy buses go back to 1905, the toys that were available to us were from the 20s. I don’t think there were a lot of toys being made in the teens because World War I was going on and a lot of the toys that American kids played with in the Nineteenth Century came from Germany, which we stopped trading with when the war broke out.

The first and only complete remote control toy was the claim made for the Radicon Bus circa 1960 14 inches long by Modern Toys of Japan

“The first and only complete remote control toy” was the claim made for the Radicon Bus, circa 1960, 14 inches long, by Modern Toys of Japan.

“Manufacturers in the United States started making toys inthat era, so it’s much less common to find toys from the teens thanit is from the 20s, which was a prosperous time in which peoplecould afford to buy toys for their kids. There was an explosion oftoys at that time,” says Delbagno. During World War II, when metalwas scarce, some toy manufacturers made their products out of woodand even cardboard. It’s anyone’s guess how many objects made ofthese materials have withstood six decades worth of play.

Fifth Avenue may have since given over to modern modes of transportation, but those early buses from a century ago, long forgotten by most, are nostalgically remembered in this exhibition. For Delbagno, all roads lead toward one destination: the New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex in Grand Central. “It’s just a very fun, nostalgic place to be, and I think we got what we were looking for in a Christmas show.”

Admission is free. For information, 212-878-0106 or www.mta.info.



   

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