Three-year-old Brooklynite Mikel Mongoven races into one of the subway cars housed in the lower level of the New York Transit Museum. He climbs onto a seat and busily adjusts a few important knobs as his mother, Kristen Mongoven, looks on. “He’s obsessed,” she says of her son’s fascination with the museum.
“He really likes the old-fashioned trains because he loved the movie ‘The Polar Express.’ When he comes here, he feels like he’s acting it out.” Mikel’s grandmother, visiting from Chicago, sits in the train with him. “Mr. Conductor,” she calls from across the aisle, “Could I have some more hot chocolate, please?” Mikel pushes off the seatback and jumps to the ground. He is all business, obliging his grandmother with a swift pour of his imaginary pot. Located in a decommissioned station on the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights, The New York Transit Museum was originally intended to be the fi rst stop on the 2nd Avenue railroad—but the line was never created. In 1976, however, it found its true purpose as a museum dedicated to the subway.
It was the year of the country’s bicentennial, and since the subway was such an important marvel of engineering, it made sense to create an exhibit celebrating it. According to Laura Kujo, the museum’s education manager, many subway employees had been too proud of their cars to let them go to the scrap heap and had instead hidden them away on unused tracks. They eventually made their way into the exhibit. “When the train cars fi nally did come out, everyone was so impressed,” she recalls. What began as a three-month exhibit grew into a permanent museum. “People are always complaining about the subway,” says Gabrielle Schubert, the museum’s director. “But once they visit here, I think they will start to learn about how it works and better appreciate it.” With their fascination for seemingly all things transportation related, kids have much to love about the museum. On the main level, the major attraction is the “On the Streets” exhibit.
Part playground, part classroom, it’s where kids can practice sitting behind the wheel of a bus, steering it, turning the lights on and off, and making their parents pay the fare to board. Push a button and they’ll hear a bus driver announce the schedule. Push another button and they can watch “soot particles” fl oat up through a tube and get trapped before leaking into the air. Roxanne Robertson, the museum’s director of special projects, explains, “Children live in a world of don’t. They can move around a little
freer here. No one is telling them don’t touch.” Other exhibits on the
main level include “Steel, Stone, and Backbone,” where older children
can read sensational tales about the danger of the subway and the
workers who risked their lives building it. One display allows children
to look up into the earth to see what lies between the subway and the
buildings above.
On the lower level, visitors are immediately
mesmerized by an explosion of vibrant colors in a wonderland of train
cars and vintage trolleys. Among them is the historic Brooklyn Rail
Train, a type of elevated train used before the subway came into
existence.
It offers kids a trip back in time with its gleaming
mahogany exterior, wicker seats, hanging leather straps, and window
panes etched with the letters “BRT.” Little ones marvel at the
old-fashioned fans, while older kids ponder the advertisements that make
their parents chuckle: one ad promotes the fi lm “The Glass Menagerie”
with the slogan, “Let those dinner dishes go, take the subway…see a
show.”
On Saturday
afternoons, one of the museum’s boisterous tour guides leads The Fare
Finder workshop, one of the museum’s many weekend activities for kids.
To start off, she encourages children to zig-zag, single-fi le, through a
row of turnstiles ranging from older, beautiful antiques to the sleek
present-day models.
“Did you notice anything different about
those turnstiles?” she asks her participants on a recent Saturday. Some
of the kids nod. “Did you notice that the wood ones have arms like
this?” she makes airplane arms and swings from left to right.
“And
the metal ones have arms like this?” she makes a wide-open alligator’s
mouth with her arms. “The metal ones are smaller. When they got smaller,
you could fi t more people in the subways at once.” Next, the children
take offi ciallooking money bags on a treasure hunt, where they’ll
collect and then count treasure, in the form of coins, fake bills, and
tokens hidden in each of the train cars on the lower level.
In
addition to workshops for children, the museum also has a Teen Tech
program for local high school students interested in design and
engineering.
In the summer, the museum partners with the Center
for Architecture to run a separate program for 12- to 17-yearolds, who
may be too young for an internship but would still like to pursue their
career interests. Past projects include designing a new rear entrance.
“They
experimented with junior-level computer programs similar to those used
by real architects,” says Kujo. New technology has allowed the museum to
broaden the scope of its projects to create a subway without
walls, a unique
transportable museum experience, which allows people to walk through
different subway stations and see the architecture and environmental
features at each station as they listen to podcasts.
“What we do here is
ultimately about storytelling,” sums up Virgil Talaid, the museum’s
education coordinator (who often dons a conductor’s hat). “Sometimes
it’s fi rst-person narratives, and other times it’s relating history.”
Indeed,
there are plenty of stories to be told about the subway. When you do go
visit, make sure to learn about Elizabeth Jennings, the fi rst
African-American woman to ride a trolley. Or read up on the old City
Hall station—the “jewel in the crown” of the subway during the City
Beautiful movement. Or, even better, ask where the old subway cars go
after they leave the tracks. One small hint: Nemo would be thrilled.
The New York
Transit Mu seum is located at the corn er of Boerum Place and
Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights. For more information, call
718-694-1600 or visit www.mta.info/mta/museum.
Stopover In Manhattan
Although it’s based in Brooklyn, the New York
Transit Museum is coming to Manhattan over the holidays with its annual
Grand Central Holiday Train Show, on view through January 19, 2009. The
show features models of trains that most kids have ridden in real life,
including Metro North and the New York City Subway. The train models run
on eight separate loops of track through a 34-footlong miniature
version of New York City. The trains speed by holiday scenes—including
Santa’s workshop. And there are a few new highlights for this year,
including a scale model of the Brooklyn Bridge and six new buildings.
The show is taking place in the New York Transit Museum’s Gallery Annex
in Grand Central Terminal, just off the Main Concourse in the Shuttle
Passage. Admission is free.
