A commuter bus returning from New York City to Newfoundland struck equipment that protruded onto the traveled portion of Route 23 near the High Crest Lake entrance during a project to dualize the highway in 1953. (
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The Northeastern Line, a transportation company that operated a bus route from the original Route 23 Meyer House Newfoundland business area to the Dixie Hotel bus terminal in New York City, had a serious accident on Route 23 north in 1953 when work to dualize the historic old highway was underway. A bus heading toward Newfoundland hit a piece of parked highway construction equipment that was sticking out into the traveled section of the road just north of the Rte. 23 bridge before the High Crest Lake entrance road where work on a section of the highway between Smith Mills and Charlottesburg was underway. The impact of the bus/machine collision sent part of the machine into the bus. Efforts to find additional information about the accident have been unsuccessful.
Shirley Tice Rhinesmith Mazalewski grew up in Newfoundland and remembers taking the brown Northeast bus from the original Meyer House to Butler, where it made a stop to pick up New York-bound passengers. Shirley and her Butler High School 1950 classmate Dolores Card (later Kreps) then took a Public Service Bus into Paterson, where the original state college building was located. By 1954, when they graduated from Paterson State College, the campus at Wayne was completed in time for their commencement and after receiving their bachelor’s degrees, they both began their teaching careers.
The Northeastern Line bus service in New Jersey was with New Jersey Transit from the early 1980s following the acquisition of private bus companies. New Jersey Transit was established in July 1979 through the Public Transportation Act to manage and operate public transportation in New Jersey. In 1950, the Northeast line was part of the Public Service Transportation system, operating since 1917 as a bus subsidiary of the Public Service Corporation.
The Northeast line ran from Hoboken Terminal through Jersey City, Newark and into Northern New Jersey in the early 1950s. Destination for the bus from Newfoundland was the Dixie Hotel at 250 West 43rd St. near Times Square in midtown Manhattan. The hotel, opened in 1930, had its own bus station and 700 rooms. It was developed by Perce and Harry Uris and catered to budget travelers with small no frills rooms. People from places like Newfoundland could go there by bus and enjoy Broadway shows and travel around the city with affordable overnight accommodations available. The Dixie Bus terminal closed in 1957 when the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal opened. In later years, after it became known as the Hotel Carter, the hotel eventually gained a negative reputation due to many problems.
The hotel bus terminal was on the ground floor although the loading platform and waiting room were five feet below street level. The facility was accessed by two arrival and two departure ramps that could accommodate 40 buses per hour. The ramp level led to both 42nd and 43rd streets. The center of the terminal had a bus turntable with a diameter of 35 feet, with 12 loading slots arranged around the turntable. The terminal handled 350 buses daily during peak service seasons.
Busses drove from the street through a door onto the turntable which rotated to the proper stop. The center of the turntable was four inches below the room, preventing buses from rolling off the turntable by accident. The bus driver pulled forward into the slip allowing passengers to alight and board their bus at the widest part of the platform. To prevent buses from rolling backward onto the turntable, each sloped two inches downward from it. The loading platform itself was about six inches above the slip to leave the terminal. Buses exiting would go in reverse toward the exit ramp. A dispatcher used an electric device to control all the bus movements and announced departure for each bus. The loading platform wrapped around each of the bus slips. There were entrances to the waiting room on either side of the terminal. A café, newsstand, ticket booths and elevators lead to the hotel lobby. The turntable facility was an amazing way to create needed space in a small area. The turntable at the Dixie Hotel was one of the many like it located in small bus stations areas throughout the nation at the time.