New York's Vintage Buses Take Center Stage at Transit Museum Bus Festival

Thousands of visitors flocked to Brooklyn Bridge Park on Sunday for the New York Transit Museum’s annual bus festival, a celebration of the city’s evolving street-car and bus fleets. The centerpiece of this year’s event was Betsy, a decommissioned double-decker coach that carried New Yorkers along Fifth Avenue from 1931 to 1947. The six-bus walkthroughs gave attendees a rare chance to glimpse inside vehicles that helped shape the midcentury transit experience.

Betsy drew crowds not only for its two-tier design but for the story behind its retirement. Despite Betsy’s ability to carry more passengers, the bus was decommissioned after just 15 years in service due to the cost of paying both a conductor and a driver, and the challenges of reviving a two-tier system in later decades. Betsy was sold in 1961 and spent time in Nevada, Alaska and even Toronto before the New York Transit Museum brought her back to join its collection — most of which is stored in a Bronx depot. "Now that we have accordion buses, those can hold almost as many people, though they’re not as charming as double decker buses," curator Jodi Shapiro noted, while emphasizing the value of preserving rare designs. She added that the event has drawn thousands of supporters for more than two decades and that, for many youngsters, buses and subways remain a kind of magic. "I think that, especially for a kid, subways and buses are these magical things," she told The Post, describing the display as a window into city history. "When I was a little kid waiting for the bus and it’s bigger than my parents’ car there’s lots of people and it goes to places that we normally wouldn’t go. There’s so many books, songs about [buses] … and they just look really cool."

Alongside Betsy, festival attendees could explore a range of vehicles that represented decades of mobility in the city. A 1950s green-and-yellow bus, notable for serving as the first air-conditioned model in the United States when it debuted on Fifth Avenue, drew nostalgia-filled lines. A 2016 Ford F750 tunnel-scrubber truck highlighted the maintenance end of the system, while a 1969 Flxible Corporation bus in electric blue offered a glimpse at the fleet that served the Bronx and Staten Island, prized for its ability to traverse steep hills. A 1970s General Motors “New Look” bus also stood out, including a 1993 “Made In America” poster that adorned one of the vehicles in the display.

Festival-goers of all ages shared in the experience. “I like buses, especially old buses, old trains, old cars,” said 81-year-old Brooklyn resident Paul Haymont. “Nobody’s putting the new ones in a museum.” Nearby, 6-year-old James, wearing a MTA-map shirt, said it was “really cool” because, as he explained, “one bus made my dad think he was back in the 80s.”

Shapiro noted that several more buses in the museum’s collection are undergoing restoration, including models from the 1940s and 1950s, and even a double-decker from 1917 that has taken more than three years to revive. “Usually when a type of bus or subway car is ready to retire we start talking with the Department of Subways or Buses about preservation,” she said, adding that the museum already has stock of the famed orange subway cars set to be phased out this year. “Things that are sort of different and rare, we always try very hard to preserve,” she added, describing how colors, seating arrangements and advertisements reveal how transit designers imagined city life.

Avid transit fans, ranging from gearheads to families, lingered over each vehicle as music-like chatter and engine-like sounds filled the park. Organizers said the festival serves as a living archive, offering visitors a tactile link to a city’s evolving urban landscape and the people who moved it.

Several other buses in the museum’s current restoration pipeline include additional work from the 1940s and 1950s, with the notable goal of reintroducing a portion of the fleet to the streets in a future exhibition. When complete, the collection will provide museum-goers with a more comprehensive look at the arc of public transportation in New York City.

The annual event has become a fixture in the city’s cultural calendar, drawing thousands of attendees for more than two decades. By combining walk-throughs, interactive exhibits and a quiet, reflective space on the waterfront, the festival connects residents with a vital part of the city’s history — the vehicles that carried generations to work, school and adventure across a bustling metropolis.

As the museum continues its preservation efforts, organizers hope the festival will inspire future generations to value the engineering, design and human stories behind New York’s transit systems. The festival’s success underscores a broader commitment to keeping urban mobility history accessible, even as the city evolves with new technologies and shifting transportation needs. The electric-blue Flxible bus and the 1950s air-conditioned model serve as reminders that change often comes in stylish, surprising forms, leaving visitors with a sense of wonder about the journeys that carried generations before them.