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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. Alameda has flotillas of trailered boats parked on the street, what with it being an island and all, but I haven't been paying much attention to them for this series. However, this old Evinrude- which has been parked for weeks on a particularly parking-challenged block on one of the busiest streets in town- has vintage charm that runs fathoms deep, so here we go: our first DOTS boat! Anyone who grows up messing with cars in Alameda will eventually come into possession of some sort of wretched patched-up beater of a 60s motorboat, even if that person knows nothing whatsoever about nautical crap. Someone will offer you a boat/trailer combo as part of a deal on a car, and you figure an engine is an engine, right? Next thing you know, you're roaring around on the Bay with all the required gear on board: boombox, cooler full of beer, and pirate...
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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. Cadillacs sold pretty well, even after most of a decade of Malaise-y gas prices and general sense of diminished expectations, so you could still buy a great big angular slab of rear-wheel-drive Fleetwood as late as 1984. Here we've got a raggedy '79 Fleetwood that's been sitting on a major commercial strip for a couple of weeks now. This stretch of road is a popular spot to park cars for sale, since the traffic is so heavy. This Caddy, however, has no For Sale sign in sight; it may belong to the resident of a nearby apartment building, or it may be abandoned (this car has the telltale purple window tint, indicating that it is probably on its last owner). The APD is vigilant about this sort of thing, so a date with a tow truck may be in the offing. These things listed at $21,735 from the factory, or about 65 grand in 2008 dollars. Power...
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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. Can you believe we've never had a Honda Accord in this series? Have the early Accords become that rare? They sure have, which makes me sad; the first-gen Accord was a great car for its time. It was reliable, had fairly decent performance, was less cramped than its tiny Civic cousin, and- in my no-doubt-shared-by-few-others opinion- looked pretty good. The Accord's engine had the same CVCC technology as the Civic's, but it displaced 1600cc instead of the 1488 of the Civic. With 68 horsepower, the Accord was no hot rod, but its weight of just 1,993 pounds- about 1,650 pounds less than the current Accord- kept it zippy enough to be fun. The price was pretty good, too: $3,995, about the same as the '77 Chevy Nova Concours and about 400 bucks less than a new VW Dasher hatchback. It's always fun when I find a DOTS car with another one...
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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. When we had the quasi-abandoned '70 Karmann Ghia last month, I got a flood of emails from rusty-state readers who were aghast that such a rare car would be allowed to go to The Crusher. Thing is, Karmann Ghias aren't at all rare around here; I've been passing today's car- which is located just a few blocks from my house- for months and months, figuring I'd get around to shooting it one of these days. And here it is! This one might not be a '74, but the bumpers place it somewhere in the Malaise Era. It's a Beetle under the skin, but for some crazy reason the sporty Karmann Ghia actually weighs more than the utilitarian Beetle: 1,919 versus 1,831 pounds. Both cars got the 46-horsepower 1600 engine. Yes, US emission-control regulations were tough on the air-cooled VW. The price tag on the Karmann Ghia was pretty nice for a...
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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. 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. Since I started doing Down On The Street, I've been hoping to find an old street-parked Airstream for the series. There are a few on the island, but they're stubborn driveway dwellers, never venturing out into fair DOTS territory. However, a Hell Project Apollo motorhome, parked with most of its windows removed in an upscale East End neighborhood full of million-buck Victorians is almost as good! I can't figure out the date of manufacture of this monster, other than placing it sometime in the 1970s; this Apollo fan site provides some history for you vintage RV buffs. Apparently the Chrysler 440 was a popular engine for Apollos, but I must assume that one this big requires the torque of a diesel to get it rolling. As for rolling, this Apollo seems to be undergoing some sort of restoration. It's a newcomer to the neighborhood, so it...
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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 a '65 Mercury Comet Caliente last week, and before that the '65 Comet 202 and the '64 Comet Cyclone . No shortage of Falcon-based comets on the island… but how about the Maverick -based Comet? Mavericks themselves, sure- a '70 and two 74s - but now we're going to look at our first Malaise Comet. The Mercury Division couldn't do a whole lot to de-Maverickize the Comet, but they were able to get these distinctive taillights on the car. Sure, they hurt your eyes even after 35 years, but they're definitely of their time . I found this car less than a block from the '65 IHC Travelall . The '73 Comet 2-door listed at $2,432, which was 102 bucks more than the equivalent Maverick (and $55 more than a 2-door base Chevy Nova). The 200-cubic-inch inline six engine was standard, but you could upgrade to the 250 six or...
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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 one I'm quite familiar with, since it's now sitting in my back yard. No, it isn't my current Personal Hell Project; I'm helping Czech automotive journalist Bobash realize his dream of terrorizing quaint Central European villages with an ocean-liner-scale Fuselage Look Mopar. You may recall the '81 Corvette I inspected for BobAsh a while back; that car is now roaring around the Czech Republic in all its Late Malaise glory. This car was a one-owner, estate-sale find. The late owner was a San Francisco chiropractor who garaged it, had it serviced on the dot, and (apparently) never allowed anyone to sit inside. It's got a few minor dings and dents, but almost everything works and the (purple whorehouse-esque) interior is the nicest I've ever seen on an unrestored 90,000-mile car. It's not what you would...
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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. Here's a car that had been sitting in a backyard in my neighborhood for years- in fact, enough years that Jimmy Carter was president the last time it moved under its own power- and which I had been offered free last year (on condition that I'd haul it away right now … and I might have taken it, had it possessed an engine and lacked the odor of decades of raccoon habitation. Finally, the long-suffering landlord on whose property the car had been abandoned got fed up and pushed it out onto the street in all its single-doored glory. The yellow '72 Porsche 914 lives at the same address, but the crucial difference is that the Porsche is owned by a rent-paying tenant and actually runs. I can't puzzle out the year on this car exactly, but items such as taillight lenses seem to point to 1970 or 1971. VW experts? The owner seemed to be hoping...
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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. One thing I've tried to do is keep Volkswagen Old Beetles from overwhelming the series; that's because there we've got more air-cooled Beetles than any other type of old car on the island- more, even, than Chrysler A bodies. This doesn't mean, however, that I should avoid them completely- I just need to space them carefully… and our last one was all the way back in June. So here we go- our first DOTS Super Beetle! I'd had a couple of old-style Beetles prior to getting my first Super Beetles, and the switch from the old torsion-beam front suspension to McPherson strut suspension (this being the primary difference between the Super Beetle and the regular kind) didn't feel all that meaningful while driving. However, the new front suspension made room for lots more storage space under the hood. I'm not 100% sure of the year...
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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. Most of the time, the manner in which I locate and photograph these cars follows the same pattern: I grab my camera and walk to a neighborhood I haven't checked out in a while and shoot anything interesting I find along the way. Other times I spot a car while I'm driving somewhere, and I pull over and shoot it. Easy enough. Then we've got the cars I stalk ; I see one driving or someone tells me about another, and I spend weeks trying to catch them parked in a spot suitable for photography. This Manta is such a car. At least three readers have emailed me its usual parking location (on a crazy side street barely wide enough for one car to drive), but I could never catch the Opel when it wasn't absent or sandwiched by other cars blocking the front and rear views. Finally, when heading over to San Francisco one day, I found the Manta in...
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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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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 check out a 30-year-old Detroit car that's an honest-to-god daily driver and parks in the heart of Alameda's downtown. It's got its share of bumps and bruises, but it's managed to survive the hoonage that has killed off most of its second-gen F-body brethren by now. It's also managed to survive the owner's temptation to build a phony Burt Reynolds-esque Trans Am clone, and for that we should be thankful! It's not a Sky Bird Esprit , just a plain ol' Firebird. In '78, the price tag on one of these with a Buick V6 was $4,545, which $1,254 less than the Trans Am's price. That's quite a bit of money for a few acres of decals and- we're not kidding here- just 75 additional horsepower over the V6. I've always liked these Pontiac rally wheels, because they look very similar to the...
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We've reached yet another milestone in the Down On The Street series- that's right, the 1960 Triumph TR3A was the 350th street-parked Alameda vehicle that we've seen here. Those of you who are new to the series should check out the Down On The Street FAQ before you blow the rest of your work day checking out all 350 machines; that's right, every single one of those little images after the jump is a link to a bunch of car photos. What the heck, it's Friday- you gonna let The Man keep you down? 1932 Ford 1937 Cadillac 1939 Chevrolet 1941 Chevrolet 1942 Pontiac 1943 IHC 1945 Ford 1946 Chevrolet 1947 Plymouth 1948 IHC 1950 Dodge 1950 Ford 1950 Ford 1950 Plymouth 1950 Pontiac 1951 Dodge 1952 Dodge 1953 GMC 1952 Dodge 1953 Packard 1954 Chevrolet 1954 Ford 1955 Mercury 1955 Plymouth 1956 Chevrolet 1956 Imperial 1956 Volkswagen 1956 Morris 1956 Willys 1956 Ford 1957 Volkswagen 1957 Cadillac 1957 Chevrolet 1957 Chrysler 1957 Pontiac 1958 Mercedes-Benz 1959 Porsche 1959 Morris...
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