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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Today we're going to head over to the former Naval Air Station Alameda, where the Enterprise , Coral Sea , and Carl Vinson have been replaced by companies that make movies and absinthe. While the ex-base (now known as Alameda Point) is miles wide, it doesn't have many streets intended for parking and hardly anyone lives there full-time. That means the DOTS pickings aren't as good as the rest of the island, but I was still able to find this daily-driven '65 Comet parked near the old Officers' Club. We've already seen a 1965 Comet in Alameda (the Bechtle Mercury ), but that was a bottom-of-line 202. The Caliente, on the other hand, was the luxury version of the Comet, selling for $2,352 versus the $2,108 that penny-pinchers shelled out for the 202. Keep in mind, however, that the mechanically identical Ford Falcon coupe was just...
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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Today we're going to head over to the former Naval Air Station Alameda, where the Enterprise , Coral Sea , and Carl Vinson have been replaced by companies that make movies and absinthe. While the ex-base (now known as Alameda Point) is miles wide, it doesn't have many streets intended for parking and hardly anyone lives there full-time. That means the DOTS pickings aren't as good as the rest of the island, but I was still able to find this daily-driven '65 Comet parked near the old Officers' Club. We've already seen a 1965 Comet in Alameda (the Bechtle Mercury ), but that was a bottom-of-line 202. The Caliente, on the other hand, was the luxury version of the Comet, selling for $2,352 versus the $2,108 that penny-pinchers shelled out for the 202. Keep in mind, however, that the mechanically identical Ford Falcon coupe was just...
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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. The island has several old Suburbans still racking up the miles; we've seen this '63 GMC Carryall and today we'll be looking at an equally weathered '65 Chevy. This truck parks about a half-block from the '65 Thunderbird and just around the corner from the '87 Mercedes-Benz 560SL , with at least a dozen Alameda DOTS cars living within a couple blocks. Sometimes you need to do a little Field Expedient Engineering to keep your doors shut, once you've turned over the odometer a few times. This truck has plenty of harmless surface rust, with every indication being that it's still about as solid as it was when LBJ was president (though the interior was a lot nicer back then). Why did this truck's original buyer decide to go with The General's two-door rather than International Harvester's four-door , in spite...
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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. We saw an Alameda Mustang just a couple of days ago, but I'm making the rules here and I say there's no reason we can't have a two-Mustang week! I found this '65 parked on the same block as the '78 Datsun 280Z , the 1986 Toyota Corolla GT-S and the 1960 Cadillac . Alameda has plenty of first-generation Mustangs and I haven't been in any hurry to shoot all of them, but this one really caught my eye with its interesting mix of black-plate originality and no-hurry-to-paint-it primer patches. The vinyl top looks fairly recent, so most likely this car is undergoing one of those very slow restorations and being used as a driver in the meantime. Perhaps it will become a trailer queen once the project is done, but for now it shares the road with Tauruses and Sentras. The GT option package got you a 289 V8, disc brakes (which were still...
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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. You might have a hard time finding the car in the photo above, since it's about the size of a toaster, but that tiny red object is a right-hand-drive Austin Cooper S. I chose 1965 as the arbitrary model year for this one, but my not-so-comprehensive Mini expertise places it in the 1963-69 era. Experts, please weigh in (and, yes, this could easily be some kind of Frankensteined Cooper S clone, in which case there's no telling). I found this car parked all alone in front of Alameda High School, alma mater of Jim Morrison, Phyllis Diller, and yours truly. I saw several other vintage Minis buzzing around town that day, so there must have been some sort of secret Mini gathering on the island. I asked Mini-owning WhatWouldJesseDo , but he hadn't heard about any such event. I'd really like to put a Honda 600 next to one of these and see which...
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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Some are beaters, some are flawless, all are cool. Today, we're going to address the Thunderbird Deficit, with this '65 Thunderbird Landau I found parked just around the corner from the Corvair Van . So, that Thunderbird Deficit I mentioned earlier- it turns out we've seen only one Alameda Thunderbird in this series, and that was a gloriously hideous '61 . Now it's time to look at a nice 60s T-bird. Looks like the interior is in great shape, down to the factory AM radio. Judging from the sticker, it appears that the car's owner is a regular at Alameda's finest tiki bar . Speaking of this car's owner, a simple check of the Radiator Hoes site shows that it's my fellow Alameda East Ender, Swiskee. We've also seen Radiator Hoe Bon Bon 's Dart wagon , as the Hoes have a strong Alameda contingent. galleryPost...
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Vintage Racer continues to send in his excellent photos of old race cars (the last one being the '54 Mercedes-Benz 300SL ), and today we're going to check out this one-of-a-kind '65 Iso Rivolta Daytona. Powered by a Weber-ized Corvette V8, the Daytona was a one-off prototype similar to the '64 Iso Rivolta Le Mans cars; go here to get the whole story. galleryPost('Iso_Daytona', 3, 'Iso Rivolta Daytona Ready To Race');
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The Mazda 1500 wagon combined parts-obtainment impossibility with nobody's-ever-seen-one obscurity to beat the right-hand-drive '75 Nissan Fairlady in Friday's Choose Your Eternity poll . We weren't sure how well a non-rotary Mazda would fare in such a matchup, but the win was by a decisive 60/40 split. Today we're heading to Detroit, which always presents certain challenges for this series; how do you find a Detroit Big Three machine that's hell enough? So much standardization of components and so many junked examples surviving- the coolness part is there, but where's the hopelessness? However, let's say you want to restore a 40-year-old police car, complete with the correct engine, vintage cop gear, decals, the works... ahhh, now we're talking! You see some nice mid-60s big Fords , and you can find totally trashed parts cars , but when's the last time you saw a '65 Ford Police Interceptor that actually started life as a police car? You know...
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newVideoPlayer("StrangerThanParadise_65Coronet_476.flv", 506, 423,""); We've got John Lurie , Richard Edson (you may know him best as the Zappa-esque "Evil Valet Parker" in Ferris Bueller's Day Off ), and Ezter Balint in a 1965 Dodge Coronet sedan with Screamin' Jay Hawkins on the tape deck. Yes, it's Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise , which has some seriously Jalop-worthy road-trip sequences and comes to us courtesy of this YouTuber.
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The pre-Malaise Chevelle is a good example of a once-ubiquitous car that has largely disappeared from the streets, due to a one-two-three-punch combo of vulnerability to rust, suitability for hoonage, and high collector value (the same three items are also applicable to the first-gen Camaro). We saw a '71 Chevelle Malibu and a pair of '69s last year, but that's been it for the Chevelle contingent in this series so far. Until today, because I've had these shots of a '65 coupe in reserve for a while and now seems like the time to bring 'em out. This car doesn't seem to move much, judging by the dusty windows, but it looks to be complete and fairly solid. I found it parked on the same block as the BMW 3.0 CSi , though I'm pretty sure they're not owned by the same person. Most of these cars came with 194-cube sixes or 283 small-block V8s, though the options list included the 300-horse 327 (you had to wait for '66 to get a big-block Chevelle from the factory...
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We've seen a late-60s Torino-based Ranchero and a Malaise Era Thunderbird-based Ranchero so far in this series, but how about the Falcon -based Ranchero? I found this cartruck parked next to the '69 Buick Electra 225 , and I suspect they were owned by the same person (the Buick has since departed, presumably sold). After spending the late 50s as a big, unwieldy cartruck based on the full-sized Ford Ranch Wagon, the Ranchero then became a small, easy-to-park Falcon cartruck. You could get this generation of Ranchero with a 144- or 170-cube inline six engine, or step up to the 260 or 289 Windsor V8 . This example doesn't show any 289 badges on the fenders, though it may have been fitted with a V8 since being built. Overall, it's a very solid and rust-free machine, and it's good to see it parked on the street every day. But was the Falcon-based Ranchero too small for serious truck use? I had a '60 for a while and it did fine for my purposes, but I'm not a big hauler...
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While we saw a Chevy truck about a month ago, the most recent Chevy pickup truck was way back in February. So today we're going to head over to a part of Alameda I've mostly ignored in this series (save for the '72 Mercury Monterey ): Bay Farm Island (if you're an Alameda old-timer) aka Harbor Bay Isle (if you prefer a name made up by the developer that built a lot of tract homes there in the 80s). While technically part of Alameda, BFI/HBI (which is not really an island; it's on the mainland, adjacent to the Oakland airport) was mostly built up after World War II, and thus most of the houses have garages. That means the pickings are slimmer for street-parked old cars... but they can still be found! The standard engine on the '65 Chevy pickup was the good ol' reliable 230-cube six-cylinder. Hey, wouldn't it be fun to swap in the Pontiac OHC version of this engine? OK, not as much fun as putting that engine in a Nova. I had the use of one of these trucks for...
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Last year, Belvedere Adrian brought two vehicles from his fleet of old Plymouths, plus his vintage Serro Scotty trailer, to a tailgate party before an Oakland Athletics game, and a good time was had by all. Last weekend, however, we figured we needed more Belvederes , so Adrian brought five of his favorite B-bodies, including the still-streetworthy Thunderhill 24 Hours of LeMons-bound '66 . The Junkyard Boogaloo Boombox was there, the food was excellent, and the A's ended up crushing the Royals like cockroaches. Lesson learned: the more Belvederes, the better the party! galleryPost('BelvedereTailgate', 9, 'Five Plymouth Belvederes and One Serro Scotty');
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After I was caught in a camera-challenged condition when spotting the '70 Fiat 500 near my office in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood and was forced to use the 640x480 so-called camera in my cellphone, I resolved to start carrying a real camera at all times. Naturally, I totally spaced on the camera thing when I caught sight of this 21-window Transporter while out for some Bánh mì on my lunch break last week, and once again we all get to look at blurry, wide-angle cellphone shots. These things didn't fare too well around here, because the sun and smog tend to eat up the seals around all those windows, which lets rust gain a toehold it generally never relinquishes. But here's a very original black-plate example that (if the window stickers are to be believed) has been damn near everywhere. galleryPost('DOTSBESFTransporter', 6, '21 Window Type 2 In San Francisco');
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Hey, if you shoot enough photos of old cars on the streets of Alameda, sooner or later you'll get a shot that looks something like a Robert Bechtle painting! The photo above made me almost happy enough to forget my frustration that there's a super-original, 4-speed-equipped '68 AMX parked a couple doors down from this Comet... in a driveway , and thus off-limits to DOTS. The pain! And believe me, Alameda has plenty of DOTSworthy cars parked tantalizingly out of reach in driveways. Say, this Volvo Bertone, not to mention a 50s Land Rover, several Barracudas, a showroom-condition big-block '65 Impala, and... well, you get the idea. But never mind that- let's look at this fairly solid Comet, which is fair game for the roving DOTS camera! Charles Bukowski drove a Comet, though his was a few years older than this one. Still, that bestows some literary cachet upon the little Mercury. The '65 Comet 202 2-door listed at $2,108, which was $131 more than the mechanically identical...
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