There’s a section of Wabash Avenue in downtown Chicago’s “Loop” District that’s referred to as “Jewelers Row”. Over the stretch of two city blocks that run north and south between Washington and Monroe, there are a series of storefronts on the eastern side of Wabash that specialize in selling all kinds of jewelry. Most of these stores close around Five O’Clock in the afternoon, and most merchandise is then taken out of the display cases near the front windows, but passing these storefronts is nevertheless an insightful look into how some of the better-to-do people in this city spend some of their disposable income.
It was against the backdrop of these shops that I spotted our featured car while on the way to a meeting after work. Following its disastrous downsizing for the ’86 model year, the Eldorado’s styling was mildly tweaked for ’88, including an overall three-inch stretch, front fenders that were slightly revised, multidimensional taillamp lenses (instead of the previous, flat units), and a few other external changes. The overall effect may not have gone far enough in restoring the Eldo’s previous visual pomp, but the changes for ’88 (lasting through ’91, after which it was redesigned) were certainly a welcome improvement, no matter how minor. Sales nearly doubled for ’88 over the prior year, to roughly 33,200 units from the previous year’s 17,800 figure.
What crossed my mind when I took this photo was that perhaps this Eldorado was a metaphor for a precious stone here on Jewelers Row. I’ll ask a couple of open-ended questions: Was larger necessarily better, in the case of the personal luxury flagship coupe from GM’s premier division? Or, was this downsized Eldorado intended to be seen more as a little gem by the product planners? (Perhaps like a cubic zirconia – a close enough approximation of a big luxury car, but distilled into a luxo-lite, technologically advanced package?) You’ll notice that this Eldorado is not actually a top-trim Biarritz (which featured a padded vinyl half-roof), but a base car with a very nicely done, aftermarket cloth top.
Thursday, October 16, 2014.
Cadillac had previously, and successfully, created a luxury car in a smaller package in the first-generation Seville, the above example of which I had photographed (also on Jewelers Row) and posted to the Cohort close to five years ago. Even with everything going on around it, this nominally “compact” Seville looks more than dignified, even within the context of the timeframe in which I had photographed it. (Imagine how small it must have looked relative to the luxo-barges of the mid-’70s with which it had shared roads, garages and showrooms, back in its heyday.)
Thursday, July 23, 2015.
As for me, I can always appreciate pride of ownership, so I liked that the black Eldorado’s owner parked it proudly curbside in front of one of the larger jewelry stores along this stretch of Wabash. Aftermarket wheels and all, it was in beautiful shape, and its paint and chrome glistened. Even if It didn’t possess but a fraction of the visual gravitas of the above model that had preceded it by less than twenty years (a ’71 Fleetwood Eldorado convertible also photographed on this stretch of Wabash), the newer car still looked shiny and pretty sitting under the L. In the shade of those elevated tracks, your Flint-born, Midwestern author would be hard-pressed to tell a cubic zirconia from a real diamond. In certain circumstances, sometimes even just the illusion of quality can be enough.
Downtown, The Loop, Chicago, Illinois.
Thursday, March 14, 2019.
Eldorado, really I always think of a big car when that badge is mentioned, I’m not sure shrinking them was a good idea.
A person can do anything up to a point. When that point has been reached, be it drinking, eating, or napping, everyone should know what that critical point has been reached.
Cadillac nailed it with the ’79 to ’85 Eldorado. To me that is likely the best looking post war Cadillac there is. It had presence, it dripped of being a Cadillac, and while longer by about ten inches, its width was shockingly manageable, being of a width somewhere between that of a new Corolla and a new Camry.
But for 1986 the party was over, the fat lady had sang, it was all over but the crying, so forth and so on. We had reached the point of too much. Now, the question may be whether that point was too small of a size or a design not befitting a Cadillac. I’m thinking the latter. It plainly said GM car but it did not say Cadillac. The 1988 model was a step in the right direction, but somebody had already puked on the keg – it was too late.
The ’79-85 Eldo/Toro/Riv were very clearly from the same design team as the G-Special coupes, but they were just as clearly several levels above them. The ’86s just looked too much like the much cheaper N-bodies and the Buick/Olds versions of both suffered the most, the Toronado and Riviera looked cheap and undistinguished to their target market while the Skylark and Calais looked fogeyish to theirs.
I like the ’79-’85 Eldorado series as well, but nothing can replace the presence of the mid-to-late 1970s series.
The 1977 Eldorado:
Jason, Regarding your comments. Amen, I couldn’t agree more. The ’79 to ’85 Eldorado especially without the vinyl roofing had an elegance missing from the prior portly series from 1971-1978.
I well remember where and when I first saw the 1986 Eldorado for the first time, and well remember my disappointed shock…..and I wasn’t alone, as subsequent sales figures showed. Stylistically GM screwed the Cadillac pooch with this series and then heaped more badness on its customers with the Cadillac HT 4100 V8 hidden within.
Sad for GM. Ultimately a major strategic blunder leading the customer onto the road to the Lexus LS400 when introduced in late 1989. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Arguably when Lexus came along, it was what Cadillac should have been doing.
Jason, I agree with everything you wrote here. I don’t think this Eldorado is a bad-looking car, but it doesn’t say “Cadillac” like so many other designs that were more distinctive.
I had previously assumed that Eldorado sales had shot up in ’85 in anticipation of the new, smaller models that were coming, but this was not true – 78,000 for ’84, and a similar 76,000 for ’85, according to my automotive encyclopedia.
The 1986 downsizing could have worked for lesser GM marques but it went too far for Cadillac because it LOOKED small. Lincoln Town Car on the Panther platform and Chrysler Fifth Avenue on Volare-Aspen bones had more plebeian ancestry but the looked more imposing, the way Cadillacs were supposed to look. But another factor was the oncoming aero revolution, with the same year Ford Taurus/ Mercury Sable making all the boxy cars look old.
You make some great points. Your reference to the Chrysler Fifth Avenue being based on the F-Body Plymouth Volare & Dodge Aspen was a great reminder. I was fully sold on those being legitimately upscale cars back when they were new. Chrysler did a great job of adding all of that period gingerbread – and convincingly so (to me, anyway).
These cars were the worst of all worlds – a flawed concept being saddled with flawed styling that made everything worse.
I think we forget that Ford and Chrysler would have done the same thing in continuing to shrink their high-end cars, but were prevented from doing so only by their shaky finances at the time. GM got could afford to do what everyone wanted to do. And what a curse GM’s wealth turned out to be.
Frankly I have always thought that the 71-78 Eldorado was the ultimate cubic zirconia of luxury cars. It was big and gaudy and cheap. The American companies had largely quit dealing in real diamonds after the 1960s.
Why can’t GM get off their lazy ass and make a limited run of Escalade Eldorado two door SUV’s, they might actually catch on and show the hideous Bentley and Lambo SUV’s and the good looking but cancelled Range Rover coupe how its done. I don’t want to hear it would be too expensive either, to take an autozone parts delivery Chevy and put an Escalade interior and wagon body on it, then charge $100K plus.
They could maybe do it, but the problem I see is that people would know where the basic roots came from, that it was essentially a rebodied version of a Chevy truck. How good is a Chevy truck nowadays? (As a foreigner I don’t know, you tell me). But Bentleys, Lambos and Range Rovers in this market segment have a reputation for superior engineering and on- and off-road ability as well as the package. And though they’ve been trying to restore Cadillac’s uniqueness for several decades now, trying to claw back that reputation, GM brands don’t have the cachet to compete in that area of the market nowadays.
Chrysler did try to shrink but did it by stretching the K-car and retaining 4-cylinder power, albeit with a turbocharged option. But it looked stubby and shrunken until the Dodge Dynasty and its Chrysler sibling artived with V6s, do enough still went for the rear-drive V8 to keep it around despite near-zero updates, until 1989. Fleet sales to police didn’t hurt.
That is a hilariously teeny tiny wheelbase, I’m getting a strong Aston Martin Cygnet vibe from this.
It’s 108″, same as any G-body would’ve been at the time (and probably with more passenger space thanks to FWD), and only 1/2″ shorter than the competing Lincoln Mark VII. The styling and especially the large aftermarket wheels are what make it look dinky.
They look dinky even with their OEM wheels. It’s the proportions that are the culprit.
At the ’85 introduction, folks who didn’t know/care much about cars would have (rightly or not) assumed it was just another GM N-body. Although (I’m fairly certain) they shared nothing chassis or mechanical with the N-body, the Eldorado sure *looked* like one. This wasn’t long after the Cimarron debacle, which may well have been the ultimate Cadillac Deadly Sin, and people weren’t going to fall for it twice.
The Cimarron analogy seems apt. It’s hard to fathom how GM would think the Cimarron (which was still in production in 1986) wouldn’t loom large in consumers minds when they looked at ‘any’ of the downsized GM PLCs, especially when a division (Buick and Oldsmobile) had a downmarket car that looked quite similar.
I guess they must have figured since Chevrolet didn’t have a car that looked like the downsized Eldorado, at least Cadillac was safe…
I guess that just goes to show that deep within GM, upper management still wasn’t taking the competition seriously.
Total N-Body vibes being felt over here, too, but it wasn’t nearly as pronounced on the Eldorado as it was with the ’86 Buick Riviera.
Once people saw that the Emperor was not wearing any clothes, it was the beginning of the end for GM and Cadillac.
How could the company go from Standard of the World to standard rental car?
Well, this was one of the many ways.
For all the faults, nomenclature is a big issue when purchasing a car. The buyer expects a new model to meet anticipation based on the historic name used on it. The El Dorado was a top of the line car, first as a special version, then as a fully separate model designation. By the time this downsized malaisemobile came out, it had virtually nothing in common with the historic name. For all of their faults, Cadillac’s other cars, when radically different from past ones, carried new names. The Seville, the Cimmaron, and the Catera may have not sold fantastically, but they did not carry the burden of trying to be what the former version of a model had been.
If they had downsized AND changed to a new name, it may have been a chance to reach out to both current owners and prospective customers outside their base. Would it have made a difference? Who knows, but it could not have been any worse.
Interesting. So maybe this car should have been introduced under new name as a lesser personal coupe, the Eldo name held over for a season, and then applied to the Allante when it came out. Would the Allante have been more in line with traditional Eldorado values as top-of-the-line Caddy?
Pete, that’s a darn good idea.
Pete, I think the only questionable thing about possibly applying the Eldorado name to what became the Allante was the cross-continental identity of the newer car.
To me, “Eldorado” has always seemed as American as a steak at the Brown Derby. The Allante had styling by Pininfarina and made all that travel across the Atlantic.
…But I do like your “what if”. 🙂
“To me, “Eldorado” has always seemed as American as a steak at the Brown Derby. The Allante had styling by Pininfarina and made all that travel across the Atlantic.”
Well the 1959-60 Eldorado Broughams were handmade in Italy by Pininfarina as well!
Ken, you’re absolutely right! I had forgotten about that. Thanks for pointing that out.
And now, I like the Pininfarina connection between the 1959 – ’60 Eldorado and the Allante.
Exactly. While I would not have thought of using Allante, some other name may well have worked. If we are using other names Cadillac did use, Catera would be a good choice. I would have gone for something more Mediterranean city names in influence (Seville and Biarritz were model names), so perhaps Ibiza (although used by Seat) or Majorca or something along those lines.
And if the Allante had been the El Dorado, I really do think it may have done better. People understand model names. The El Dorado was the epitome in PLC from Cadillac, and an El Dorado convertible was the ne plus ultra.
The Allante was all that, but carried a huge penalty for the costs associated with shipping it from Italy via Alitalia jets. If they would have killed off that idea, built it in the USA, and shaved a few thousand off with the cost savings, it may have done quite a bit better.
My father in law sold machine tools and automation equipment to auto manufacturers and suppliers. He would make the trip from southwestern Indiana to the Detroit area two or three times a month, driving unless the winter weather was just too bad. He was partial to Cadillacs and would purchase a new one every two or three years. He was in the process of retiring when we first met (early 1985) and must have decided it was time to downsize his vehicle. In any case he bought one of the downsized Eldorados when they first came out in the fall of 1985. You will probably not be surprised to learn that he despised this car, calling it a tiny, worthless POS, among other things. It made one trip to Florida for the annual winter vacation before he got rid of it. My FIL blamed Cadillac and the local dealer for his unhappiness with this purchase (if you knew the man this would not surprise you) and he transferred his allegiance to Lincoln, owning and operating a succession of Town Cars for the remainder of his life.
Joe, I imagine that more than a few Cadillac buyers jumped ship for Lincoln’s more traditionally-sized / appointed / styled vehicles in the ’80s. I’m sorry to hear your FIL’s experience with his Eldorado was subpar. I don’t know much about the reliability and systems of these cars, but I haven’t read much either way (good or bad), so I always attribute most of the negative reviews exclusively to styling (okay, and the HT4100 🙂 ).
I don’t think Big Bob’s Eldorado was a bad car in and of itself. The problem was more his expectations of what a Cadillac should be and how this one deviated from that image. I have no idea why he didn’t trade the Eldorado for one of the more traditional vehicles Cadillac was still making. I suspect it had to do with him being ticked off at the dealer for selling him the downsized Eldo as much as anything. In the event I’m sure the folks at the Cadillac dealership were happy to see the last of my father in law; especially after he retired he had little else to do except complain and find fault with various aspects of his life. The man had to turn up the volume on the TV to ear bleed levels but could hear the faintest squeak in his car at 60 MPH.
The thing that strikes the right chord with the big old Cadillacs is just how natural they look in a dense urban environment. I’m no fan of the 71 Eldorado, but is there any other car that looks this perfect sitting under the L with the skyscrapers in the distance? The first gen Seville in all its sheer look boxiness too looks right at home under the passing CTA train above.
The 88? Sorry, but it looks like a novelty golf cart.
I think that’s an early Cimarron prototype.
Hahaha!! “With styling by Fisher-Price!” That picture was good for a laugh, Matt – thank you.
I had a co worker who bought one of these brand new. He was very happy with it and kept it for ten years. He said that was his perfect car. He had owned the previous model for the many years. Personally I was more impressed by the 1992 model, which like the ’79-85 models seemed to more accurately hit the mark. I’ve always felt that the post 1970 Eldos were just too big and bulky.
These come across as having been designed for a dystopian America, a panic response inspired by a desperate need to reach CAFE standards. A 108″ wheelbase is actually decent size – look what European designers were doing with a dimension like that. But somehow the proportioning was way off, and these look smaller than they are. Add all the applied ornamentation, and these look like a cartoonist’s vision of a prestige car, rather than the real thing. Not even a cubic zirconia, more like a little girl’s dress-up toy.
Sorry, I just can’t take this car seriously.
I, too, always get the impression that these Eldorados are smaller than they actually are. The same thing is true for the larger K-car variants. I have to wonder if it’s the large greenhouse that’s the reason. Babies are born with proportionally large heads, which do not grow much larger relative to the rest of their bodies. Having such a big ‘cap’ on the top of the car in some ways could lead us to infantilize it.
Truly beautiful pics Joseph. Thank you! I like your jewelry analogy, and also how the background of each image nicely reflects the look and feel of the respective eras of each Cadillac. Nicely done.
I find the alloy wheels on the ’88 Eldorado lend it the appearance of a toy die cast car. In fact, it looks like one of your optical illusion photos… a life-sized Matchbox Eldo!
My favourite pic and Cadillac here, is the Seville. Even though GM completely bastardized its styling themes well into the 80s, its design remains original and well proportioned. Your pic has a strong 70s urban feel, I really like.
Was never a fan of the bloated early 70s Eldo. Your photography providing it grace and elegance here, it typically lack in photos.
To me, 1988 in popular music will always be the breakout year for Bobby Brown. If you checked, this cassette single was perhaps in the tape player of the ’88 Eldo. 🙂
Thank you, Daniel! I actually like the wheels, but their large diameter just seem to enhance the stubbier aspects of this car’s overall shape.
And I do remember ’88 very well. That was the year I started high school, and between Bobby Brown’s “Don’t Be Cruel” (which I’m sure I still have on cassette somewhere), Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl”, Milli Vanilli’s “Girl, You Know It’s True” – all of those albums and songs from that year just take me back to walking the halls of Central High School, in a very positive way.
You know Joseph is a good photographer when he makes Wabash look good. 🙂
All kidding aside, it’s such a bizarre little pocket of downtown Chicago. Used to work just down the block years ago and there’s a lot of strange things to see and do. When I used to smoke, there was a small old-time tobacco shop with old mahogany paneling and a thick cloud of cigar smoke we would go to- it was like being transported from 2013 to 1971 as you went up the old elevator. I could easily see the owner of the old Eldo coming in for his favorite Cubans.
There was also a little jewelry mini mall which consisted of a narrow walkway, about 50 feet long, lined with glass cases with all manner of watches, rings, etc. but we didn’t go in there to shop for a Rolex- once you got past all the cases the room opened up and there was a great Mediterranean place with a small sit-down area we’d go to for lunch.
Most of downtown is exceedingly clean, but this little stretch manages to be, at least to me, more seedy, run-down, and charming than almost anywhere else downtown.
CJC, thank you, and I love your take on this section of the Loop. I’ve been trying to do more exploration this year, so I think I want to check out some of the food courts in some of these grand, old buildings.
Thanks Joseph, as always I really appreciate it.
I purchased a 2017 Cadillac ATS. I was not impressed. I sold it and bought a 1996 Lincoln Mark viii. I’m much happier now. New cars are trash.
Just be mindful of the very troublesome, and very expensive to fix air suspensions on the Mark VIII’s. My grandfather had a ’97 he bought new and had the front bladders replaced under warranty, and then again out of warranty for $3,000! Ouch.
The ’80s is what set Cadillac into a crisis mode. Cadillac had lost is direction in engineering, style, design, quality, reliability, etc. While the 79-85 Eldorado was Cadillac’s very last successful personal luxury car and looked nice, its replacement in 1986 was about as horrible in execution as the Cimmaron in 82. The 80-85 Seville was another mess and what proceeded it was a downsized mess in 1986. Cadillac made some strides in the mid 90s in style, engineering and design, but it wasn’t enough to keep GM’s regal brand up to the challenge of the luxury imports that pretty much squashed the division. Even today a base model Mercedes or BMW has more allure, style and presence to it than any Cadillac currently in production. It’s really too bad that GM let Cadillac fall to pieces in the 80s. They could’ve been a competitive force with the changing automotive culture, but the old bean counters and product planners let their game pieces fall to the floor. If another GM division is to fade into oblivion it’ll be Cadillac.