Here’s a small bus route sign at Greenpoint and Gale Avenues in Blissville, at the entrance to Calvary Cemetery. Today, bus route maps are somewhat larger and are mounted on oblong boxes mounted on poles. (The boxes also used to contain the schedules, which are today obtainable only from an app, which I believe is ridiculous, but I will avoid my inclination to rant).
These small maps were mounted in the 1960s, but you can still find a handful of these around town in out-of-the-way areas, under elevated trains, places like that. Many of the 1960s routes are the same as today, but not the ones shown here. The Q24 still runs from Greenpoint into Sunnyside and then back to Williamsburg, and while the Q24 still takes this route, roughly speaking, the Q29 is now a short route connecting the #7 82nd Street station at Roosevelt Avenue with Queens Center at Queens and Woodhaven Boulevards, then south to Myrtle Avenue and 80th Street.
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4/27/21
9 comments
Why print METROP’L’T’N AVE instead of METROPOLITAN AVE?
The Greenpoint-Sunnyside-Williamsburg bus route you refer to is actually the B24 (http://web.mta.info/nyct/bus/schedule/bkln/b024cur.pdf), presumably since it originates and terminates in Brooklyn.
Yep tom its b24..nice catch!
Kevin, those 2 bus routes were Brooklyn routes, B24 & B29. According to the MTA website there is no longer a B29. And the Q29 does indeed go to the Queens center but continues on to Myrtle Ave And 80th Street in Glendale. The Q24 is a Jamaica\Brooklyn route
Great find and posting. I remember those signs, which were originally installed around 1965 (yep, dating myself). They were an improvement over the complete lack of bus info at every bus stop, but they were schematic, hard to read, and often depicted multiple routes even though only one of the routes depicted may have actually stopped at the particular location where the map was installed. Today’s maps and schedules are, in my opinion, far better.
The seeming recycling of the Route #Q29 has an explanation, and also needs a minor correction. Q29 is a former Triboro Coach Corp. route that connects Jackson Heights (82nd St. and Roosevelt Ave.), passes Queens Center Mall and continues south to Glendale (80th St. and Myrtle Ave). It’s now part of the MTA Bus Company (since 2005). The 24/29 route depicted on the old sign was a combination of two Brooklyn routes, B24 and B29, that were originally BMT trolley routes in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg area but have been part of the NYC public sector operation since 1940 (NYC Transit Authority since 1953). More recently the route was simply renumbered as B24.
My point is that the B29 and Q29 were always separate routes, and had different operators. The old bus stop sign did not include the borough prefix that is now used to designate all NYC bus routes.
I think Charlton Heston found that sign in one of the Planet of the Apes movies.
Could be said of a lot of New York infrastructure.
Let’s be honest
Those so called maps where useless.
You where still clueless even if you found a stop that had one!
The Triboro ones would give you the RT number and more!
A ratty old newspaper stuffed behind an ancient, half-obsolete bus route map, partly cantilevered by who knows what, and half-obscuring a bar code plate. Ah, New York! The shear random weathered layered-ness of it all. I know ye well!