New York Hall of Science
2nd Floor Layout

The Halls of Science

The A.C. Gilbert Company operated 3 Gilbert Halls of Science.   The first and Largest was located in New York City at 5th Ave. and 25th Street.  Additional Halls of Science were located in Chicago, at 512 S. Michigan Ave. (In the Congress Hotel), and in Washington D.C., at 1610 K Street N.W..  In Miami, Florida, a 4th "Hall of Science" at 300 East Flagler Street was operated by Leroy Jahn, a friend of A.C. Gilbert.  A.C. sent layout builder Frank Castiglione to build a display layout there, but it was an ordinary display layout.  Jahn's friendship with A.C. Gilbert was probably the reason he was allowed to advertise his store as the "Miami Hall of Science. 1 

The biggest attraction of these Halls of Science were the layouts, which were the largest American Flyer layouts of their day.    The ultimate layouts of which dreams were made.  The New York Hall of Science had three layouts, two on the first floor that were open to the public and a huge one on the second floor that was used by the sales staff to promote sales to major buyers.    It was also used for advertising and promotional purposes but was not open to the public.

The Second Floor Layout

At the time, the 2nd floor layout was said to be the largest toy train layout in the world.   It was certainly bigger than the Lionel showroom layout.   Because the 2nd floor layout was not open to the public, the only glimpses most of us had of this layout were occasional photos in the catalogs, and through the Boys' Railroad Club television programs.  While these programs were ostensibly filmed on a layout located in the basement of one of the boys, most of the train action sequences were filmed on the second floor layout at the New York Hall of Science, with a few shots involving the boys filmed on a much smaller studio layout.

This section collects the illustrations of the second floor layout from The Gilbert News, a newsletter published for factory employees, as well as catalogs and other publications.    Most importantly, it also presents copies of original photographs taken in 1950 or 1951 for inclusion in the American Flyer Model Railroad Handbook.    These photographs are referred to as the The Buckage Collection and I am indebted to Clay and Charlie Buckage for making these high quality photographs available for this website. 

Additional information on the 2nd floor layout, including a track plan showing the 1953 version of the layout, can also be found in photographs of a presentation on the subject at the 2006 Flyernut Meeting at York.  Click here to see photos of this display on myflyertrains.org.  The photos are the last four on the page.

Notes

(1)  The Marvelous American Flyer Display Layouts, by Roger Carp - Classic Toy Trains, August 1992, page 57.

(2)  It is possible that the actual size of the layout could be somewhat more or less than the generally accepted 80 feet.  An article in The Gilbert News, Volume 12, No. 5, September October 1952, page 7, gives the width as 80 feet.   The article cited in footnote 1 above gives the dimensions as 16 x 92 feet.  The Flyernut presentation from the 2006 York meet referenced above lists the dimensions as 11 by 80 feet and from the track plan the 11 foot dimension appears not to include the wider area of the bumpout where various accessories were displayed.   Some who have visited the layout remember being told by Bob Schloss, the individual in charge of the layout that it was 77 feet long.  According to Google Maps, the width of that building that housed the Gilbert Hall of Science appears to be trapezoidal in shape, rather than rectangular as it appears in most illustrations.   Based on the scale of Google Maps, I estimate the width of the building to be approximately 85 feet at the street and 92 feet at the rear of the building.  In any case, it took up the entire width of the second floor between Broadway and 5th Ave and was significantly larger than the Lionel Showroom layout.