Beloved Hobby Retailer Red Caboose Reaches the End Of the Line
The last holdout of a dozen or so Gotham hobby shops will be gone by the middle of October, as its building on West 45th Street is slated to be torn down soon.
| 04 Sep 2026 | 06:26
Red Caboose owner Allan Spitz has decided, after 56 years in business, to close the store. It is the last hobby shop left in Manhattan, outlasting the dozen or so that had been names known to savvy Manhattanites looking for their model railroads. (
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For 56 years, the Red Caboose has sold model trains of all gauges, both new and used. Here, some used postwar Lionel 0-27 locomotives await the buyer that needs them to add to his or her train layout. (
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After 56 years in business, Manhattan’s last hobby shop will vanish before the holidays. No more over the counter sales of hobby items in Gotham. (
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Inside the vestibule at 23 West 45th Street in Midtown West, a showcase reveals a small amount of hobby items available downstairs at the Red Caboose. (
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On the way down the stairs to the store, display cabinets fill the stairwell with merchandise. No wasted wall space is evident. (
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After descending the store stairs, you face the desk, visually embellished by the merchandise on hand at virtually level of vision. (
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The Red Caboose features model trains in all sizes. This is part of the N scale stock on display, perfect for railroad empires in tiny Manhattan spaces. (
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You are looking at the book section in the store, filled with new and used books about trains, both big and little, each encased in plastic covers to keep them in good order. (
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As a train store in Manhattan, local subways and commuter trains are a large draw, as evidenced by the goods on display. (
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Keeping up with the hobby demands of the 21st Century, the store has many aircraft models for sale, ranging in size from tiny to almost a small desk top. (
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Like to assemble plastic kits? The world is yours here. (
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If die-cast vehicles interest you, this is the right place for your purchases. (
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Do you ride buses a lot? Here are work desk ornaments, or, perhaps you’d like to stick pins in them after an agonizing transition experience today... (
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The Red Caboose, the last of the old-time hobby shops in the city, is closing. With the shop’s demise slated for mid-October, Christmas will be a little different for its legion of loyal customers this year.
The sandwich sign in front of the basement shop at 23 West 45th St. announced on August 31 that “Everything Must Go.” The beloved basement shop was closing, after a run of 56 years. For 54 of those years, it has been under the same owner, Allan Spitz, who is 80 but said that left to his own devices, he had no intention of retiring. He was at home in his shop crammed with Lionel trains, model airplane kits and other hobby toys.
“I feel at times as though I’m in a winged chariot when I’m in the store, perfectly in my groove,” he said, “but then I look around, and while they’re going to take all the merchandise, I’m inured and, you know, comfortable with it.”
“Seeing your past is ever present,” said Spitz, adding wistfully, “I didn’t finish every project, I’m obsessive compulsive.”
The culprit is a familiar if lamentable one: a developer is purchasing the site with plans to evict the existing tenants and knock down the building. A new tower is to be in erected on the footprint of both 21 and 23 West 45th Streets, adjoining five-story retail and commercial buildings.
With the news of the store’s closing on the internet coupled with reduced prices, Spitz said business is actually up in recent days.
A neighboring commercial tenant paid a visit, informing Spitz that the sale of the building has not been consummated, but should be in a month or so. The other tenant mentioned he had nine months on his lease for eviction. The landlord has not shared any information with the Red Caboose’s owner yet, although he did contact them to ask about specific building violations after a fire department visit this year.
Spitz was glad that the closing would be over, but it was also sad for him. He noted that with the store closing, he was self-deporting.
Spitz was asked by Straus News if he would see anything positive in six months from now. “No, I do not,” was his answer. “Big things make me sad—now, I’m talking about pulling the Band-Aid off and be done with it,”
He noted, “In my niche, I’m very happy to be doing retail, even if people think I’m cantankerous.” Not every customer feels positive about the store, as remark on social media websites attest, but on the other hand there is nobody else like him left in the city. Spitz started the partnership with two others in 1970 opening the Red Caboose Hobby Shop on East 32nd Street, just off Fifth Avenue; a few years later he bought out his partners.
The owner has a special bond with some of his clientele. “I have very nice relationships with people, love to meet everyone at the counter and talk to people today. What did this guy do? Oh, this person’s mother had cancer, what kind? A musician who had a neck problem came in today, which affected me, as I had similar issues.”
While the store moved a few times, it has been in its basement location at 23 West 45th Street for 32 years, on the former site of what was Model Railroad Equipment Company’s home. At one point in the mid 1970’s, there were four hobby shops on that block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Others, like the five-story Polk’s Hobby Shop near the Empire State Building, closed in 1980, after almost 45 years of business. Spitz knew the store well; he worked there for a short time.
While model railroading was its mainstay for most of the last few decades, the Red Caboose branched out to sell plastic model kits, die-cast cars and trucks, and airplane models, reaching out to a broader audience. However, with the current multitudes of hobby items imported from all over the world, each hobby store (mostly single retail sites) faced the prospect of costly diversification of inventory, shorter retail markups, and the onslaught of e-commerce.
As a native who grew up in Stuyvesant Town and graduated from McBurney School, Spitz is vested in Manhattan, and the store has become not just a workplace, but a social outlet to meet and greet those who come in at lunchtime to get parts for their locomotive, and those who hail from across the seas. Not one to take a long vacation, he still works at the store six days a week.
Items ordered last month and model trains from decades ago will be for sale for the next few weeks. If you’re in search of that unique piece, rush to 45th St. soon.
After some hemming and hawing about what to do when he decided to close this location, a solution came in the form of a specialty auction house, slated to start hauling out the inventory a few days after Labor Day in small moving trucks. (“I was told by a moving sales expert that I’d need a 40 foot tractor trailer,” Spitz told Straus News Depending on how much can be loaded on each trip, the store could be bare in less than three weeks. When that happens, Allan Spitz will truly be retired.
The owner of the auction house, Jared Schoenly, paid his first visit to the store on September 2. Now it will be his job to remove the inventory. Packers are coming, spending two days to start pack up, then trucks will be arriving the next day to start carting some of the boxes away. Spitz noted that he would be receiving more money if he had done that, but found that too much physical work.
Schoenly remarked, after first looking at all the merchandise “Boy, Allan, you’ve got a lot of stuff...”
Perhaps this fall, while watching an old TV show or classic Christmas movie you’ll see a whole family gathered around a model railroad layout. Mom, Dad, Johnnie and Susie will ooh and aah about the trains going through their paces. The lightbulb goes off and you decide to take out that classic Lionel train set for the holiday season. To your surprise, while sitting in a box, the train set has somehow deteriorated in storage and you’ll need a few things to make it run.
And off you go to the last extant Manhattan hobby store. But, it won’t be there. This Holiday Season will be different for Manhattanites.
Long-time Red Caboose customer Bruce Kamiat put it a bit less modestly, “ Allan and this shop were icons of the hobby world.”
“I feel at times as though I’m in a winged chariot when I’m in the store, perfectly in my groove.“ Allan Spitz, longtime owner of the Red Caboose.
”Allan and this shop were models of the hobby world.” Bruce Kamiat, longtime customer of the Red Caboose.