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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. I've been neglecting the big BMWs for most of this series, so it's time to follow up the the '86 735i with another E23 from the cocaine-and-S&L-money-mad mid-1980s. Remember the Savings And Loan Crisis? Wild West loans on worthless assets and egregious fraud following in the wake of deregulation of a once-staid sector of the financial system, ultimately costing 160 billion bucks in taxpayer money? Wait, that sounds familiar, except for the bargain price tag… anyway, here's the kind of car that a low-level S&L scamster would have bought with the proceeds of his first "dead horses for dead cows" loan. Now that I'm looking for these cars (and don't worry, 5 Series fans, I'll get some of your cars too), I'm seeing them all over the island. This '84 has seen shinier days, but it still gets its owner...
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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. BMW 2002s are plentiful on the island (we've seen a beater '72 , a '73 2002Tii , and a massive-bumpered slushbox '75 so far), though technically this one isn't on the island. I've ventured over to Bay Farm Island (which was once literally an island but is now attached to the mainland at the Oakland Airport, just as the island part of Alameda was once a peninsula), which is part of Alameda but lacks sufficient garage-less housing to make for happy DOTS hunting. However, it's still possible to find interesting machinery where Jack London once went oyster pirating, and I've found this clean round-taillight 2002 there. 1972 was the last year before the Malaise Era , so the power was still there (though the new horsepower rating system pushed the numbers down) and the gigantic bumpers hadn't arrived yet at the time this...
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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 BMW E24 is not exactly an endangered species, but it's such a good-looking car that every single one I see in Alameda qualifies for this series. Never mind that I have photographs of six Alameda 2002s stockpiled- it's 6 Series time again! This car is owned by the man I consider to be the King Of Alameda BMWs; not only does he have a '74 E9 on the street, he's got a turbocharged 745i and who knows what other droolworthy Bavarian steel in the garage and scattered around the neighborhood. We'll be seeing the rest of his cars soon enough, but today it's the E24's turn. He picked up this '82 633CSi cheap when its previous owner despaired of ever getting his PCH running. It needs some work, but the body is straight and it now runs just fine. It's tough to find an example of car-quality-per-dollar quite as good as...
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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. There's been no shortage of BMWs in this series, but I've sort of overlooked the 5 and 7 series cars so far. No more! Today we'll look at one of the last of the E23s , a somewhat scuffed but still proud 735i, located in the post-late-50s landfill part of town, not far from the '66 Dodge A100 Sportsman . Driving one of these things back in the 80s showed that you were serious . At $36,880 list (well over 75 grand- and climbing- in today's inflato-dollars), you could have bought nine brand-new Yugos and had enough left over for a couple of pretty clean used Datsun B210s. Tough decision! Nowadays, these cars have depreciated down to about 2-3% of their original purchase price. Pretty good bang-for-buck, in terms of how much German engineering and sophistication you get for your money: a 182-horsepower six-cylinder engine, big brakes...
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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. BMW 2002s aren't hard to find on the island, and we've seen this '72 , this '73 , and this '75 so far. I've built up a mini-stockpile of 2002 shots, so let's check out another '75 Bavario-Alamedan today. This one's rough, but it's more "fixer-upper" rough than "downward spiral" rough, if I'm guessing correctly. It doesn't seem to drive much, but it has the look of a car with some spare parts waiting for it in the garage… and someday they'll be installed! 1975 is the newest a California non-diesel vehicle can be and still be exempted from the dreaded emissions test. That means that you can do something to upgrade the horsepower on this car from the factory 98 to a number with three digits, all the while staying legal. With all those junkyard 3-series engines available for next...
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We saw a somewhat rough E9 BMW last fall, and now we're going to look at one that's a bit nicer. I've seen this '74 3.0 CS moving around under its own power pretty regularly, while the '73 3.0 CSi seems to be more a work in progress. The 2002s seem to get a lot more love than the big 6-cylinder cars of this era, but we'll see who fares best in the poll after the jump. Looking at the past BMWs in this series, I'm realizing that I ought to go photograph one of the late-70s/early-80s 5- and 7-series cars I see around town. They're DOTS-worthy, yes? This car lives quite close to the 1972 Fury , which can be seen in the background of this photo. Same era, totally different philosophy. The price tags on the two cars differed quite markedly as well. The '74 3.0 CSi coupe sold for $10,634, while the '72 Fury III 4-door hardtop listed at $3,813. You got a 150-horse 318 V8 standard in the Plymouth, while the BMW cranked out 170 horses from its 3-liter six ...
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We've only had one 6-series BMW so far in this series, so when I saw this '83 parked just around the corner from the '74 Porsche 911 Targa , I figured it was worth shooting. This one is a good example of a solid daily-driven car; a few scars, but nothing too serious. This was a seriously expensive car back in '83, listing at $39,120 (about 83 grand in 2008 dollars). That was pretty much three times the cost of a new 320i, and for another $4,000 over the cost of the 633CSi you could have had a Porsche 928S. Say it's 1983 and you're a low-ranking S&L employee who's managed to grab $43K in scraps from your bosses' wholesale looting. You deserve some German machinery, but what to buy? Do you take the three 320is, the 928, or the 633CSi? A few minutes at Sharknose.de tends to make me favor the 6-series. Nowadays, of course, you can buy a running example one of these cars for peanuts... but keeping one running is considerably more costly. 633CSis are pretty...
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This series has become a real balancing act for me, as I try to make sure I don't neglect one type of vehicle for too long. We had a Chrysler A-body recently, and we're definitely due for an air-cooled Beetle one of these days. Now I realize with a shock that it's been two long months since our last Bayerische Motoren Werke machine . I could show you one of the several Alameda 2002s that I've shot recently (though I'm still hunting that 1500 I see around town), but instead we're getting a Late Malaise 320i with a most intriguing vanity plate. 1983 was the last year for the E21 BMWs, and maybe the end of the line for BMW's American image of being primarily about sportiness. As the 80s ground on, a BMW in the driveway came to symbolize something other than a pure appreciation of the car's driving qualities. This example is in nice solid original condition. The question is: does David Hasselhoff own it? Does he have a secret crash pad in Alameda? A little too...
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It was bad enough to go a month without a Chrysler A-Body in this series, but two months with no BMWs? That's how long it's been! I've got several 2002s photographed (and I've been stalking a 1502 that roams the island), but all the recent K.I.T.T. talk around these parts has me feeling mighty Eighties. That means we need to don our Members Only jackets, put on our Vuarnet shades, apply some ointment to our suppurating herpes sores (wait, is herpes more of a 70s thing? OK, make that chlamydia!), brush up on our Oliver North quips, and take a look at that beautifully apt symbol of Eighties excess: the 1987 BMW L6. galleryPost('DOTS87L6Top', 6, '1987 BMW L6 Down On The Street Part 1'); Even though I was living in dirty-S&L-money-drenched Orange County in the mid-80s and no doubt saw hundreds of these things back in the day, I have only the faintest memories of the BMW L6. When I first spotted this car, I thought the L6 emblem was actually an I 6 emblem...
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Since it's still BMW Week here at Jalopy HQ, I'm going to reach into my stockpile of Alameda car photos and grab something Bavarian for the occasion. The last Down On the Street BMW we saw was the '72 2002Tii of mid-August, so today we'll look at something from the same era. As is so often the case with German cars, I am unable to figure out the exact year of this E9 ; I'm pretty sure it's a '72 or a '73 model, but I'll need you rabid Bimmer fanciers out there to help out to pin it down. I'm trying something a little different here; some folks have mentioned that I should be blanking out the license plates of the cars I'm photographing. Since the cars are parked on a public street, recent anti-stalker laws mean it's hard to get owner info from a plate number, and I don't see what harm could come to these cars' owners just from their license plates being out there, I haven't worried too much about the license plate thing. I figure a harsh-ass blur-out of the plate number would detract from...
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