The Brooklyn Trolley Blogger: Vintage Bus and the Real Manhattan Transfers

Sunday, July 31, 2016

Vintage Bus and the Real Manhattan Transfers

Bensonhurst's most famous bus driver

Part One:

I Brive a Dus ~ R.K.

Have car, can't travel? Welcome to life in Gotham. Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, we are a sidewalk trampling, street crossing, bus hopping, subway surfing, railroad riding society. Simply put, we New Yorkers are commuters. From every borough and burb we are a metropolis and citizenry forever on the move. It's our reality as urbanites, something coded into our big city DNA.

Throw in the old trolley system, and it's been this way for well over a century. For instance, this Flatbush Avenue trolley inevitably became the B41 bus route to East 71 Street.

(Pic provided by John Landers)

Be it going to school, baseball practice, Roller Palace, the movies, Coney Island, or what have you ... the buses I took as a very young boy where still colored green. And what kid/teen didn't want to ride the back corner seat with the window pushed open?

What kid also didn't have their parent tell us sit near the bus driver, whom indeed generally kept a watchful eye on familiar faces along their routes. Sadly, times have changed, and drivers instead are the ones seemingly needing protection, having been made to drive behind protective glass.

The oldest of the blue and white buses traversing today's streets are the fleet that replaced the greenies of my childhood's early to mid-1970s years. At first, they tried repainting a few of the green buses in the new blue/white motif, but ultimately retired the fleet by the early 1980s.