What's New at the Museum

PAPER PASSAGES: Collages by Chris Pelletiere

May 8 – September 3, 2007
New York Transit Museum, Brooklyn Heights

Collage (From the French: coller, to glue) 1. An artistic composition made of various materials (as paper, cloth, or wood) glued on a picture surface. Websters New Collegiate Dictionary.

The hustle and bustle of urban commuters in transit is captured by Chris Pelletiere in his collages.  The twenty-two works on exhibit through September 3 depict familiar New York City commuter scenes in overlays of newspaper clippings, bits of colored paper, and photographic images, generating a sense of motion and energy while capturing colorful moments of today’s busy travelers. 

PAPER PASSAGES: Collages by Chris Pelletiere, the first complete presentation of this series of subway collages, was inspired by charcoal sketches executed in the fall of 2003 during the artist’s commute from his home in New Jersey to his job at the Museum of Modern Art, in Manhattan. The charcoal renderings slowly evolved over time, as he added bits of newsprint, tissue paper and other printed materials to the drawings.  From a distance, the scenes portray commuters walking through turnstiles, standing in groups on platforms, boarding trains and buses and riding escalators. Upon closer inspection these disparate fragments take on new life, as images within images emerge, and scenes evolve or dissolve depending on the visitors’ proximity to the artwork.

Chris Pelletiere grew up in the Windsor Terrace neighborhood of Brooklyn and is best known as a painter, illustrator and cartoonist.  His work can be found in many public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art; The Metropolitan Museum; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The New York Public Library, and the New York Transit Museum, to name a few.

Public programming offered in conjunction with this exhibition includes:

Sunday, June 10, 1:30 pm.
ATLANTIC AVENUE ARTWALK 2007
Two-for-one admission with your ArtWalk pass. Otherwise, free with paid regular museum admission.

Meet painter, illustrator, and cartoonist Chris Pelletiere as he leads a tour of his exhibition and talks about his work

Saturday and Sunday, August 18 and 19, 1 pm.
TRANSIT COLLAGES
Family workshop free with paid museum admission

Chris Pelletiere’s collages use vibrant color, shape, and texture to depict New Yorkers on the move.  Participants will visit his exhibition and then fashion vivid transit scenes of their own. Suggested for ages 5+

 

TOOT, TOOT!! BEEP, BEEP!! TOYS THAT MOVE

October 3, 2006 through September 2007
New York Transit Museum
Corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street , Brooklyn Heights

As far back as history can trace, children all over the world have played with toys. Toys often portray the world in miniature, and toys that move have always held a particular fascination, reflecting real-life ways to travel. The exhibition, Toot Toot, Beep Beep: Toys That Move at the New York Transit Museum, in Brooklyn Heights, from October 3, 2006 through September 2007, presents over seventy transportation themed toys representing a century of technology and innovation in toy-making.

Toot, Toot, Beep, Beep: Toys That Move presents a visual retrospective on the history of toy making. Prior to the industrial revolution, toys were hand made. The advent of the industrial age introduced cast iron toys which were mass- produced using reusable molds. In the 1880s European toy makers began the era of wind-up or spring driven tin-plate toys. Some of the first American toy companies to follow suit and offer quality wind-up toys were Julius Chein in 1903, Strauss in 1914, and Louis Marx in the 1920s and 1930s. Both cast iron and wind-up or spring-driven tin-plate toys remained popular well into the 1940s, but were eventually replaced by today's less expensive plastic components.

Toys reflect the world around us, and transportation toys reflect larger technological innovations in society, in both their use of different materials and the types of vehicles they represent. Toy horses and wagons, bridges, trolleys, boats, automobiles, and airplanes bring the adult world to a scale that children can understand and control. Wooden pull-along trains were available beginning in the 1840s as the country's railroads were built. Wind up toy locomotives appeared in the 1870s, followed by steam-powered toys that mirrored real trains. Lionel, manufacturer of toy trains, introduced the first electric train sets in 1903 as train technology switched from steam to electric. Cars captured the imagination of American society when they first hit the streets at the turn of the century, and miniature cars, trucks and motorcycles have been popular playthings ever since. During the 1920s air travel, still highly experimental, fascinated people worldwide and a variety of tiny airplanes, helicopters and blimps, as well as the futuristic spacecraft of science fiction, were soon amusing young aviators.

The toys featured in Toot, Toot, Beep, Beep: Toys That Move, are just a small sample of transportation themed toys. As sociology, these toys reflect values, occupations, interests, and styles over time. As personal treasures, they represent an innocent and simpler time, linking our not-so-distant childhood with today.

Developed in collaboration with the Doll and Toy Museum of New York City, the exhibition has been supported, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

 

                            

 

THE TRIBOROUGH BRIDGE

ROBERT MOSES AND THE AUTOMOBILE AGE

June 27, 2006 - April 2008

Celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Triborough Bridge the New York Transit Museum, in collaboration with MTA Bridges and Tunnels Special Archives, presents The Triborough Bridge: Robert Moses and the Automobile Age. Opening at the museum, in Brooklyn Heights, on June 27, 2006, the exhibition presents historical photographs; comparative architectural designs of the bridge at various stages of planning; scale models; artifacts; and original film footage.

"It has long been a cherished ambition of mine to weave together the loose strands and frayed edges of New York's metropolitan arterial tapestry... The Triborough Bridge Authority has provided the warp on the metropolitan loom, the heavier threads across which the lighter ones are woven." -- Robert Moses

In the 1920's and 1930's, New York City traffic increased rapidly as the population grew and car ownership became more common. Creating a network of high-speed roadways was crucial for the City's continued growth, and with four of the five boroughs on islands, bridges would be central to the system. The first bridges to span the East River -- the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Queensboro -- carried rail and horse drawn vehicles and dumped traffic onto local streets. Linking the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx, the Triborough Bridge was designed exclusively for automobile traffic and its construction was coordinated with new approaches connecting it to the region's emerging transportation system.

The Triborough Bridge was intended to be a City project financed by bonds or corporate stock and repaid by tolls. The groundbreaking occurred on October 25, 1929, one day after "Black Thursday," the day the stock market crashed heralding the Great Depression. Three years later, hulking anchorages and a handful of piers were all that stood of the project that the City could no longer afford to build.

In 1933 New York State created the Triborough Bridge Authority (TBA) to complete the bridge. When the bridge opened on July 11, 1936, the t hree and a half miles of bridge included a suspension bridge to Queens, a vertical lift span bridge to Manhattan and a truss bridge to the Bronx -- all intersecting at a huge traffic junction on Randall's Island.

The TBA provided the framework for its parent agency to evolve into the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which has built every major vehicular bridge and tunnel within the city since 1936. Robert Moses ran the Authority from 1934 until 1968, during which time he also headed the agencies that built most of the traffic arteries that these bridges and tunnels link. In 1968 the Authority became part of the MTA and lucrative bridge tolls began to help subsidize the city's public transportation.

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What's New at the Gallery Annex

ARCHITECTS OF THE NEW YORK CITY SUBWAY
PART 1: HEINS & LAFARGE AND THE TRADITION OF GREAT PUBLIC WORK

New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex
Grand Central Terminal
March 19, 2007 — July 8, 2007

From the day New Yorkers broke ground for the city’s first subway in 1900 until the greater part of construction was completed in the 1930s, three architects — John L. Heins, Christopher Grant LaFarge, and Squire J. Vickers — determined the aesthetics of the system. These men created the decorative motifs that distinguish the system, allowing each station to be unique while contributing to its overall style. The New York Transit Museum is presenting consecutive exhibitions to celebrate these great architects. The first, Architects of the New York City Subway, Part I: Heins & LaFarge and the Tradition of Great Public Works, features over sixty historic artifacts, architectural drawings, and vintage and contemporary photographs from the collections of the New York Transit Museum, The New-York Historical Society, the Episcopal Diocese of New York, the Bronx Zoo / Wildlife Conservation Center, and private collections.

From 1901 to 1908 John L. Heins and Christopher Grant LaFarge designed the first subway stations, as well as control houses, power substations and ornamental kiosks, in the popular Beaux-Arts style, influenced by European ideas and evoking classical architecture underground using ceramics, metal, and wood. Because Heins & LaFarge began working more than a year after construction began, their primary duty was to decorate and make beautiful the utilitarian spaces built by engineers. This was primarily achieved using ceramics to identify and adorn each station. The exhibition presents a dozen pieces of these original station ceramics. Because an immense amount of ceramics had to be designed, fabricated, and installed in less than three years, numerous companies were hired to produce these pieces. The work of the noted ceramics firms Grueby Faience Company of Boston, Atlantic Terra Cotta of Staten Island and New Jersey, and Rookwood Pottery Company of Cincinnati are represented in the exhibition.

For practical reasons, the engineering and technical elements of subway stations and structures were visible to the public. Thus, Heins & LaFarge made these elements striking, imbuing them with classical design details. Examples of brass ticket booth grilles and metal exit signs are graceful, their function masked by the beauty of design and materials. Design drawings of control houses for 72nd and 103rd Streets in Manhattan, and Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn show three similar structures with decorative arches, glass, metal, and terra cotta.

In addition to being business partners, John L. Heins and Christopher Grant LaFarge were friends, classmates, and brothers-in-law. The two met as architecture students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying a curriculum based on the French school of Beaux-Arts classical approach to architecture, but also stressing logical planning and design. They graduated in 1882, and in 1886 formed their own New York City firm. Heins & LaFarge specialized in ecclesiastical and residential buildings. Today they are best remembered as the original architects for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. They began the cathedral project in the 1890s and would continue with it for two decades. During this time, Heins would also be appointed the State Architect of New York, responsible for overseeing the design and construction of all state buildings.

In the first years of the new century, Heins & LaFarge continued with the Cathedral, but also designed the New York City subway stations and the Astor Court Buildings of the Bronx Zoo. Though these important civic projects might seem, at first, to be disparate, Heins & LaFarge used similar architectural elements and fabricators for each project. Guastavino Fireproof Construction Company fabricated magnificent arches for the grand City Hall subway station, the Belmont Chapel of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, and the Elephant House of the Bronx Zoo. Atlantic Terra Cotta Company produced ceramics for numerous subway stations and the Lion House at the Zoo. Pieces of these Zoo and subway ceramics, including examples taken from the 33rd Street, 110th Street, and 116th Street subway stations are featured in the exhibition. An architectural drawing for the Zoo’s Monkey House shows a frieze with classical design elements that can also be seen in subway station ceramics.

In 1907, Heins died of meningitis. Though he would work as an architect until his death in 1938, LaFarge worked on the subway only until 1908. Another architect, Squire J. Vickers, would be responsible for New York’s subway stations for the next four decades.

Architects of the New York City Subway, Part II: Squire Vickers and the Subway’s Modern Age will be on view at the New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex from July 30 through October 28, 2007.