New York Fifth Avenue Coach Company, 1885–1960
by Oliver J. Ogden
“I want to dedicate this book to my Mother, Eleanor Ogden, for she is the one who wrote in my Baby Book under FIRST WORD: BUS!”
As the opening quote indicates, the author of this book is truly bus-oriented and that didn’t change even into adulthood. He retained “a keen interest in not only buses and trolleys, but commercial vehicles in general.” That interest extended to some of the vehicles in his own garage and also led to him working for various museums. With this book he’s assembled an impressive number of images documenting three-quarters of a century’s transportation on Fifth Avenue, New York.
One of the two 1939 World’s Fairs was staged in NYC (the other in San Francisco) where the Fifth Avenue Coach Company was the transportation provider as this map shows.
This page pair is illustrated with some postcard images and photographic ones showing changing modes of transportation over several different decades.
Actually, there are a pair of books sharing in common those two prominent words, Fifth Avenue. You instantly know the locale each is referring to but it’ll require the rest of the title and/or subtitle of each to let you know what you’re apt to find between their respective covers. The contents of those two books are very different in another unexpected way in that they complement, and for close readers can even augment, one another.
One is in no way a transportation-focused history. That said, for any historian researching this era in this city, the book’s narrative includes sufficient references to various conveyances as well as recounting the citizens’ resistance to change from horse-drawn to motorized that awareness of its existence is warranted especially as it also includes a Bibliography. Although, sadly, it has no Index and its chapter titles are not particularly helpful indicators of what information each contains.
Ah, but this other generously illustrated title is quite the opposite.
“Fifth Avenue has always been one of New York’s most fashionable boulevards . . . Between 34th and 59th streets, Fifth Avenue is lined with fashionable department stores and specialty shops. Fronting the avenue are the Empire State Building, New York’s Public Library, Rockefeller Center, St Patrick’s Cathedral, and the Guggenheim Museum. From 59th to 110th it borders Central Park; on the east side . . . were the elegant mansions” as written about in the other Fifth Avenue title as the business magnates of that era strove to one-up each other showing off their wealth.
It was that perceived fashionableness that lead to the New York Fifth Avenue Coach Company being established in October 1885. At that time, on other main thoroughfares in the city, rail lines were putting down tracks. The bus company having exclusive access to Fifth Avenue effectively blocked the rail lines from marring its elegance.
Photo captions do a nice job of specifying evolving engine, chassis, and body providers over the years and noting when pneumatic tires gradually replaced hard rubber and other changes. Thus this Fifth Avenue book offers great images while never loosing sight of the need to also impart real understanding of the times and the equipment.
By contrast the other Fifth Avenue offers lots of words but sometimes presents them in less useful manner often resorting to snarky reading passages—even entire paragraphs—to portray the Avenue’s worlds of money, art, and society from late 1820s to the latter 1970s.
If you enjoy reading of the early days of New York City and the people who helped it grow, you should at least be aware of these two Fifth Avenue titles.
The back end of the bus just barely visible top left is that of GM’s first air-conditioned transit bus built in 1956. That bus is today in the New York City Transit Museum’s Vintage Fleet.
Copyright 2026 Helen V Hutchings (speedreaders.info)
New York Fifth Avenue Coach Company, 1885–1960
by Oliver J. Ogden
Iconografix, 2009
112 pages, 252 b/w & 24 color photos, softcover
List Price: $29.95, now oup
ISBN 13: 978 1 58388 249 9
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