Big self-serve junkyards can be a fun distraction. And if you drive something between 10 and 20 years old, they can also be an excellent source of cheap parts. But when your projects leave you searching for something more unique, something older, something people say might no longer exist – you’ve got to leave the asphalt behind.
At this yard, there’s no tar parking lot, no front desk, no computerized inventory, and no price list on the wall. There’s just several acres of cars, a two-bay garage, and one guy watching over it all.
My father has been coming to this yard since before I was alive, and I’ve been coming here almost as long (literally since before I could turn a wrench). This is by far my favorite junkyard; coming here has played a huge part in shaping my automotive knowledge, experience, and taste over the years – not to mention enabling me to keep my endless parade of jalopies on the road.
The guy I mentioned before is the yard’s owner. He’s second generation – some of the inventory has been on the property longer than he has. If you want to know where something is, just ask… he is the yard inventory system. Same goes if you need a price, want something lifted, or are after something that requires the cutting torch.
I’ve taken lots of pictures in this yard, hopefully enough to keep future installments going throughout the snowy northern winter. But to start with, let’s take a look at some shots taken just over four years ago.
One of the new arrivals – an American icon now reduced to a couple thousand pounds of rusty American iron.
Wonder which mill used to lurk under this hood? (My bet would be the ubiquitous 235.)
This ’59 Parkwood wagon was another farm-fresh arrival.
Not too inviting on the inside, either. I don’t see a third pedal; perhaps it had a Powerglide.
Moving into the northwest corner of the yard, we find most of the cars are knee-deep in grass. (Shortly afterwards, all those cars were moved, the land was graded, and the wrecks were put back in their places – seems to be the 10-year ritual, performed on one quarter of the yard at a time.)
Looks pretty ’65ish to me.
What have we here? It’s big, it’s green, it’s got lots of doors, and it’s a Poncho.
It’s a ’70 (thanks to reader gottacook for the hint). A pair of deluxe wheelcovers were high and dry on the passenger’s seat.
Why you shouldn’t stand on the roof of your Cutlass… or any other car, for that matter.
Skylarks are great. But this one, not so much.
Here’s a pair of ’73 Grand Ams, both thoroughly picked over.
One is white; the other… used to be.
The white one rolled off the line with a 400. Its engine compartment is much – ahem – roomier nowadays.
A bird’s eye view, made by me, especially for you!
So far we’ve been stumbling around in the North Loop. But as you can see, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover – and this is just the first post! Stay tuned in the coming weeks to see more of these gems in the rough.
Where in Minnesota is this?
The Pontiac Executive is a 1970, not a ’68.
Looks like you posted all GM stuff in this installment. I’d be curious to know what Mopars they have, especially the C-bodies.
Not to pick nits but the Chevy interior shot is a 1959 or 1960 while the exterior shots directly above are a ’57. One of the advantages of being in a small town or rural area is that there are usually fewer regulations about what you can or can’t do on your own property. One of my father’s co-workers ran an auto repair shop in his spare time; he had several acres behind his shop that slowly evolved into a junk yard. Mr. Keach was a great person and on several occasions he let me just wander around searching for some part I needed to prolong the life of my very used 1961 Ford.
Geez, you’re right! That picture belongs with a ’59 Parkwood wagon that was nearby, and got filed out of sequence. D’oh! (The perils of writing about pictures you took years ago…)
Just fixed it. Thanks for the heads-up!
I have similar memories of a local wrecking yard/repair shop/used car lot. I bought/sold several vehicles to/from Joe, bought lots of parts out of the wrecking yard over the years, and got lots of license plates for my collection. To say nothing about wandering around and looking at all the vehicles he had, which went back quite a few years, and included more than one of my friends’ ex-cars.
looks like a good place to find a snake or bee nest. yikes. I kindof prefer the modern version for speed of actually finding something…..
This looks just like my favorite junkyards – in the 70s. I wonder how guys make a living with all of this old stuff out there. I would think it hard to find decent parts off those old cars that have been sitting in the weather for 20 or more years. I guess where land is fairly cheap a guy can do this so long as new stuff is coming in too. Cool pictures.
That 59 Chevy wagon takes me back – one of the neighborhood moms in my kindergarten carpool drove a copper one.
In this case, he seems to make most of his money off the later model parts. 15-25 year old domestic cars and trucks are what most of his customers are after.
Things are usually pretty slow on weekdays (it’s rare to see more than one other customer around, and common to have the place to yourself). But on weekends, you might see six other parties roaming the yard.
In order to keep enough of the in-demand stuff on hand, the owner tows junkers out of backyards, buys impounded and totaled vehicles, and pursues the other usual avenues. Once these are stripped clean, they get crushed for further profit.
It seems as though little of the “old” stuff sells in a given week. But land isn’t at a premium around here, and the owner isn’t crush-happy – so he sits on them, keeping them available for that one day when you need something.
Some of it is indeed very weathered. But as the years go by, I often find that what might have been unappealing a decade ago looks more useful once all the prime candidates have been scooped up.
One of my attractions for owning a yard like this would be in cannibalizing the rattier cars (and selling the extra unobtanium parts on eBay and the carcasses for the metal weight – that alone would make back what I would pay for the place) to resurrect the ones with the better bodies to sell to guys like us. Sure, the engines might smoke or the transmission slip, but it would be a sort of Nirvana for the CC crowd. It would be both frustrating and rewarding seeing one of my automotive Frankenstein’s leaving in the care of a dedicated owner. Maybe he would even help in the resurrection labor…
That would be an interesting way to spend a bit of lottery money, wouldn’t it?
I prefer looking at pictures of junkyards like this than look at pictures of new cars these days.
These pictures remind me of when my older brother,his friend,and I used to roam a back forty junkyard like this when i was younger.
We were car crazy 11-14 year old boys and of course had to poke around all of the vehicles sitting in this 25 car yard.
Lifting hoods, sitting inside the cars, imagining how they looked or sounded when new, was pure nirvana to me .
One car sitting there that I remember quite well was a 1956 Chev Nomad wagon .
Dark maroon ,or purplish was its color with what seemed to be a rust free body.
It had its complete drivetrain(V-8) and the inside was also rip free and quite nice.
At the time it bothered me to no end that a car that looked this nice(at least to 11 year old eyes) was sitting in a junkyard,never mind it was a Nomad.
The 1959 wagon is definitely Powerglide equipped judging from the transparent piece of plastic on the top of the steering column just ahead of the shift which carried the ubiquitous PRNDL acronym. Growing up our family car was a white 1960 Parkwood with a 283 and the infamous two-speed automatic. I guess my dad liked it, ’cause he followed it with a 1966 Impala with the same powertrain.
Would that have still been a PNDLR at the time?
My guess is, “probably” but what would I know about that? 😉
Powerglide was definitely PRNDL by ’59. But it could have the (infamous) Turboglide with PRNDGr.
You got me curious and I looked it up – it appears that the iron Glide was PNDLR and the aluminum second gen Glide (starting 1958 or 59) went to PRNDL. Can anybody confirm the year of the switchover?
All ‘glides were cast iron thru ’61, alum phased in in ’62 starting with Chevy II and higher perf others. The CI unit in my ’59 is PRNDL.
Is he taking offers on the four-door ’57? 🙂
Everything’s got a price 😉
Somebody recently hauled off a late ’40s Chevy pickup in similar fashion, presumably to make a rat rod of it (there wasn’t enough there to do much else).
There was once a ’62 Bel-Air coupe in the west end of the yard which was ridiculously straight and clean for a Minnesota car. Partially stripped interior, no drivetrain (ex-V8 car), no wheels – but it had a title. My old man had actually put it up on blocks, circa 1989, and had planned to buy it whole for a restoration project. An untimely injury ended up putting the kibosh on his plans, and so the car never left its spot.
It might have still been there for me to rescue as I reached my teen years (something I had often considered as a youth), had it not been for a neighbor sparking up a brush fire which burned the entire west end of the yard ten-ish summers ago. All the torched and scorched hulks – the ’62 included – got crushed. It still makes me sick thinking about all the rusty gold that went up in flames.
Others have since taken their place, but it’ll never be the same. The loss of two ’69 and one ’72 Grand Prixes was also particularly problematic, as I was preparing to restore a ’71 at the time and had been counting on them as donors. (’71-2 GPs are a recurring them through my automotive-biography… so many stories to tell! More to come on that topic some day soon.)
About that 4-door 57 Chevy:
“Wonder which mill used to lurk under this hood? (My bet would be the ubiquitous 235.)”
Very probably since the hood does not have a “V” under “Chevrolet.”
That map at the end looks like some trashtastic theme park…
Old-style operations like this are thin on the ground over here now, most are the corporate style and the map would be Holden/Ford/Toyota/Other Japanese/Everything else.
The other week a guy was telling me about the arrangement that used to work in Adelaide, South Australia 30-40+ years ago. The side street alongside the local metal recycling plant was known as “Scab’s Alley”, and you could dump a car or take parts from the dumped cars or even an entire car at no charge. Once a week the recycling staff would drag the carcasses into the plant to be scrapped.
This is one of my favorite yards, it can get a little wet but that just ads to the experience.