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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've got a car that I knew I'd find in Alameda someday: a Chrysler E Body! Now, these things have become totemic worship objects for Baby Boomers who remember when they had hair, virility, optimism, etc., so just about all of them now spend their days locked in garages in between cruise nights and car shows, much like the equally seldom-seen first-gen GM F Bodies. I've seen this Sub Lime '70 around for years, but never parked on the street… until now! I found this car on the same block as a few other DOTS honorees, including the '57 Cadillac , the VW Transporter Syncro , and a couple you haven't seen yet. Hemi blah blah blah, that's all you hear about when folks talk about the '70 Challenger's engine choices. Fact is, the majority of these cars came from the factory with 318s (60%, according to the Standard...
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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 "fuselage" early-70s Chrysler is pretty well represented in this series, with this '71 Newport and this '71 Newport Royal , but seeing yesterday's '70 Newport Royal ad made me decide to break out the photos of today's vast two-door luxury machine. The 1970-71 Chrysler C-body is actually one of my favorite Detroit body styles of all time (with the 1970 Chrysler 300 Hurst being the ultimate ), and I've often considered leaving a "How much do you want?" note on today's DOTS car. How many acres is that hood? The standard engine for the '70 Newport was a 383 with 290 horsepower, but the Chrysler dealer could get you a 350-horse 440. Get the 300 Hurst and you got 370 horsepower from your 440. Sadly, a 4-speed manual transmission was not available from the factory. There's the usual rust you see...
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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 tend to think of the Ford Maverick as a pure Malaise Era vehicle, and the two '74s we've seen in this series ( this one and this one) reinforce that impression. Don't forget, though, that the Maverick first hit the showroom floor in pre-Malaise 1969; I've managed to find an early example on the island for today. The Maverick was built on the aging Falcon chassis, with the Falcon nameplate getting moved over to the mid-sized Fairlane line for 1970, where it was used on the cheapo stripper models. The Maverick had the same suspension design- leaf springs and all- that made the early Mustangs handle so badly from the factory. Still, the Maverick was cheap ($1,995 in 1970), simple, and worked just fine as basic transportation. Look at it this way: for just $150 more than the '70 Beetle, you could get a traditional rear-drive/water...
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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. It's Truck Monday once again, and today I've decided to do something about the shortage of Nixon Era Fords in this series. A couple of sharp-eyed readers noticed this truck in the background of the photos of the Dart GT convertible , so I headed back to photograph it. It says something about Alameda that a solid 38-year-old Ford pickup doesn't even seem all that special at first glance; you see them all over the place here. For the base '70 F250 Custom pickup, you paid $2,780 and got a 150-horse six-cylinder engine. The Camper Special package added big mirrors, heavy-duty alternator and cooling system, and some extra gauges. You could get the 300 six or your choice of V8s in 302-, or 360-, or 390-cubic-inch displacements if you started eyeballing the options list. This truck appears to have the Boxwood Green two-tone paint job; the...
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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's car is our fourth Chevy Impala; we've seen a '65 sedan , a '65 Super Sport , and a beautifully wretched '70 prior to today. I'm always reminded of the car driven by Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) in Repo Man when I see a full-size Chevy from this era. The original Alex Cox screenplay (yes, I live by the Repo Code to the extent that I have a copy) was very specific about the make, model, and year of every single vehicle in the movie, and Bud's car was supposed to be a '70. Even with the bent front bumper, this car is way nicer than my 1:25 scale Beater '70 Impala model , but it's got the right number of doors. Actually, it's possible that this car is really a Caprice, since there are no identifying emblems (the Bel Air and Biscayne models didn't come in two-door versions for '70). The interior looks...
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Great big Detroit luxury machines, with two huge doors that swing out about 10 feet to the side when opened and a crude pushrod V8 with way more than 400 cubes under the hood. Aside from the low-single-digit gas mileage, what's not to love? The Lincolns of the 60s and 70s never quite sold like their Cadillac competition, but they had hoods like aircraft carrier decks and grilles carved from gigantic slabs of pure chrome. They were outrageous and beautiful, in a way the staid Caddy could never really pull off, and I wish I could find more of them parked on Alameda's streets. Sadly, this is just the fourth vintage Lincoln I've found for this series. That's enough cars for us to have a poll, though! I found this car parked on the same block as the '67 Vista Cruiser and just around the corner from the Volvo P1800 . This might actually be a '71; the external appearance of the '70 and '71 Mark IIIs is pretty much identical. Both came with the 365-horse 460 engine...
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It seems impossible, but we're on the 286th street-parked Alameda vehicle in this series and only now are we seeing a Chevrolet Monte Carlo. How could that be? The first generation of Though the Monte Carlo was based on the Chevelle, the fenders got these distinctive bulges. The factory rally wheels and center caps look good on this car, and I think the lowered front suspension works as well. The Monte Carlo was about 150 pounds heavier and 300 bucks costlier than a 307-powered Chevelle coupe, but you got a 250-horse 350 engine as standard equipment. Give the Chevy salesman an extra $420.25 and you could get the SS package, which included a 454 churning out 360 horsepower (though for some reason you couldn't get a four-speed manual with the 454-powered Monte). The question here is: do the later G-body Monte Carlos belong in this series? Say, the '82s and '83s? galleryPost('DOTS70Monte', 13, '1970 Chevy Monte Carlo Down On The Street'); DOTS 1-200 • DOTS 201...
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The little Datsuns of the early 70s are just about gone now, though a few still roam the streets of the Island That Time Forgot. We saw a '75 B210 last fall, and now we've got an even rarer machine in this early-70s 1200. I'm calling it a '71, but it might be a '72 or maybe even a '70; we'll need to rely on the serious Datsun fiends out there to nail down the exact year. This car may spend most of its time garaged, but I see it on the street in my neighborhood from time to time. It appears to be an original, unrestored time capsule of an early Datsun. I'm hoping I'll be able to find the owner one of these days and ask him about this little jewel's story. Known as the Sunny back in its homeland, the 1200 was cheap, got great mileage, and was way more reliable than its European and Detroit competition. And it has an interesting Japanese racing history as well! Who knows, maybe this is the original Yankees bullpen car (though apparently the Dodgers had...
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Sometimes months can go by between my photographing of a DOTS car and posting those photographs. Today's car is a good example; I shot the original photos last August, but the island is overflowing with air-cooled Beetles and I have a glut of photos of such cars (yes, Beetle fans, I know I should be posting more of them... and I will, promise). But this particular exposed-engine Beetle, which I'm arbitrarily calling a '69 (though it could be from any year during the 68-72 span), got in some sort of messy collision in the meantime and then moved across town. At first, I thought I was looking at a different car, but checking plate numbers told the whole story. So what we have here is your standard mildly hot-rodded late-60s/early-70s Beetle, with exposed engine but retaining the factory wheels and hubcaps. This could easily be the original engine, or the 15th, and the displacement could be anything from 1200cc all the way up to a stroked "How much money you got?" mill...
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Is it really possible that it's been two months since our last Mopar A-body in this series? Like air-cooled VWs, Chrysler A-bodies are so plentiful in Alameda that I tend to lose track of when the last time I DOTS-ized one (also like air-cooled VWs, I've owned a few Slant Six A-bodies and feel much affection for them). So here comes a nice solid 4-door Dart, which lives on the same block as the Mercedes-Benz 280SEL that came in second in yesterdays DOTS Benz poll . The Dart is one of the few vintage Detroit cars in which I prefer the six-cylinder engine to the V8, but then the Slant Six makes even the 318 seem flaky. Of course, a 340/4-speed Dart might convince me to give up the Leaning Tower of Power. This Dart gets driven every day, and there's no telling how many times its 5-digit odometer has been turned over. Check out those Buick hubcaps, which actually look pretty good on a Dodge. This car parks in front of a house in which a high-school girlfriend lived back in the day...
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We've seen a pretty nice Cadillac and a fairly rough one , but we haven't seen a beater Caddy... until today! This '70 Coupe de Ville lacks a grille and rear bumper, but so what? It looks good! And, since we love beaters at El Jalop, that's an excuse for a poll. Vote early, vote often! 1970 was the pinnacle for the big Cadillac V8s, with the 500 engine rated at 400 horsepower and a staggering 550 foot-pounds of torque. 550 ft-lbs is getting into 18-wheeler territory! This '70, which lives just around the corner from one of the smallest DOTS cars , doesn't seem to move much. Maybe it's someone's personal Hell Project... or maybe it runs only on human blood (which is almost as expensive as 92 octane these days). All I can say is: this thing had better have Cherry Bombs! OK, now let's have our poll! Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser. galleryPost...
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You see how obsessed dedicated I am to shooting Alameda street-parked cars for this series? Even in the midst of a rainstorm howling in off the Pacific, I'm busting out the camera when I spot a cool car parked on Alameda's busy main drag! And it was worth it in this case, because nothing makes a beater LTD look tougher than rainwater pouring in past all the bad weatherstripping. We've already seen a '70 LTD two-door in this series, so that means we'll need to have a poll to determine which one is the readers' choice! Is this three-dimensional vinyl top beautiful or what? The Chevy dealership across the street can't compete! And the dogdish/fat-blackwall combo is just perfect! I wouldn't change a thing on this car... well, except for putting a 460 and 4-speed in it, of course. And Cherry Bombs (but that goes without saying). My grandparents had one of these cars back in the day. In fact, it's safe to say that everyone's grandparents had an LTD! galleryPost...
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Alameda has quite a few early-70s Volkswagen Transporters, and so far I haven't paid much attention to them (since the island also boasts so many early Type 2s, including this '56 , this '57 , this '62 , this '63 , and this '67 , not to mention others I haven't shown yet). But I'm making an exception for this '70, because second-gen Transporter pickups were a rarity on American roads even 30 years ago and they're virtually unheard of on the street these days. As cool as this truck is, the vastly greater load capacity, 6- or 8-banger torque, and functional heater of a cheap Detroit pickup must have made the VW pickup a tough sell in 1970. However, this Volks is still a genuine truck ; note the water heater in the bed! Even though the VW's engine location dictated a very high bed floor, you still got these slick storage compartments on the sides. And if you wanted a forward-control small pickup in the 1970s, this was one of your only options (Dodge...
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Even though we saw a Dodge truck just a couple weeks back , it's been much longer since we saw our last Dodge pickup . That means it's time for us to feast our eyes on this industrial-strength Power Wagon. The grille design means it's either a '70 or a '71, but once again I'm (mildly) ashamed to admit I can't figure out the exact year of a DOTS vehicle. Power Wagon experts, fill in the blanks! In any case, this is one of the last of the original American Power Wagons. What a name: Power Wagon! Too bad there's no reactor in the bed, because then it could be the Nuclear Power Wagon. This truck lives on the island's East End, in a parking-challenged neighborhood, and it's clearly someone's daily driver. Must be fun parallel-parking this brute! Sure, it gets 8 MPG and the ride feels like a shopping cart in a rock quarry, but the driver of this truck can snort in derision at drivers of luxurious modern pickups. galleryPost('DOTS70PowerWagon'...
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One thing you don't see too often in Alameda is cars with horrible rust. Another rare sight is a big old Detroit bomb being used as a serious bicycle transporter. Today we're going to look at a car that offers both! This '70 Skylark lives just down the street from the '69 Ambassador wagon and around the corner from the '76 Skyhawk , and it is one mean-looking Buick. galleryPost('DOTS70SkylarkTop', 6, '1970 Buick Skylark Down On The Street, Part 1'); This car has been in its neighborhood for a long time, but I've never been able to find out whether the owner (who's clearly a fan of Bianchi bicycles) chooses such a beautifully wretched car in order to express contempt or admiration for the very concept of the automobile. You never know with bike freaks- they tend to appreciate machinery more than most, but they can be touchy on the subject of motor vehicles. Very clever homemade bike racks here- looks like you strap the rear wheels into these channels...
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