(first posted 1/21/2019) It’s no secret that Portland, OR has been one of the fastest growing cities in the country in recent years. It’s “where young people come to retire”, as well as others. And the streetscape has been changing rapidly too, like these condominiums that have replaced so many smaller street front low-rise buildings.
But this venerable Rambler Classic has survived, yet.
Curtis must have shot this pretty late at night, as the streets are deserted. During the day, they’re jammed, which has made Portland a less frequent destination for us. We used to think nothing of it to pop up for the day. Now we have to have a bit more compelling reason, of which there are still plenty. But then we time our arrival and departure more carefully.
But there’s still plenty of old cars on the streets. They can’t get rid of them so easily. This Rambler is helping to “Keep Portland Weird”.
Nice car!! It has stood the test of time.
I have only lived in the Portland Metro Area just over 5 years and I too have seen changes though obviously not as many as folks like Paul. I still love living here despite the changes and hope for a brighter future.
Also found in Oregon are a surprising number of older, more mundane vehicles that are extinct in other parts of the country. Finding vehicles as old as this Rambler requires a bit of hunting from my experience.
Born and raised here. If you are not, just go away. Simple as that.
As one born and raised in Florida, I feel your pain.
Really? So people don’t have the right to move into other cities, even if they may be productive members of society? I’m from Florida too, but I put up with tourists and outsiders because I know they bring a lot of needed revenue in.
I’m born in Chicago but I love new people coming here. Nothing better than meeting new neighbors and helping them get acclimated. Heck, would anyone turn away Joseph Dennis from their birth city? 😉
I think the prevailing attitude of most major cities/states is generally welcoming. It would be short-sighted not to be.
Well, except maybe Detroit. During the inaugural running of the Detroit Grand Prix, there were t-shirts that said, “Welcome to Detroit! Now, leave…”.
@R&DMan
I have a bit of a conundrum on my hands since my Mama’s side of the family spent a bunch of time in the Pacific Northwest after fleeing the Irish Potato Famine.
My grandma arrived in Philadelphia and never went back then my mama moved to Upstate New York and never moved back to Philadelphia.
The last Northwest relatives we know of passed away in the 1970s and there are more out there we do not know of. I did grow up hearing some stories of the Pacific Northwest and that was one of the reasons I wanted to move there which I did several years ago.
While I have some historical ties I know I am not a local.
The 65 Rambler Classic may have been AMC’s peak blending of attractive styling and high quality. Although the car has a bit of a generic 60s quality to it, I have always found these perhaps the best looking of that entire 1963-66 range.
Some great photos!
Was going to say the styling looks very generic. The thick centre grille bar with vertical teeth looks like a fifties throwback.
Here is my ex-Rambler. A ’65 770 Classic. Yes I had a mental aberration for redoing this one, but I was a sucker for a clean and straight body, and one thing about Ramblers was that the body shells were well made, and benefitted from their steel treatment and paint process at the factory, which makes many of the survivors, even as old beaters surprisingly rust free. Mind you it was all still Rambler, so you have to take all the rest of the weirdness with that in mind, but as a Portland car, I cant think of many more as well suited to “keeping the weird alive”.
As a car it was ok, but I really preferred my ’63 Amby HT, with its smaller size and groovy styling touches was more memorable as a daily driver. Great car. Just not exactly nimble, nor cutting edge as a “top of the line” offering with its vacuum wipers. Made my ’61 Olds F-85 seem normal by comparison. As long as the F-85 didn’t overheat, which was another story altogether.
Beautiful car.
I saw this same exact car some seven years ago on a trip to Portland, and it had the same mismatched wheel covers then as it does now. Nice to see it still plugging along.
Those low-rise condos/apartments/dorms are taking over the east coast too, everywhere here in the DC suburbs in Maryland and Virginia, helped along by the big interests behind the builders that are making things hard for owners of detached houses, duplexes/quadplexes, and small one- or two-story commercial buildings. The architecture is identical to what’s pictured above – is there only one architect designing all of these and they just plop them down in different cities? The only clue that it’s not Prince Georges or Montgomery County, MD is that Rambler. I haven’t seen any Rambler here in years. Not sure why this is such a bad old-car-spotting area.
Denver is similarly afflicted, perhaps more have been built there than anywhere in the US in the last 10 years, possibly excepting Austin. Those are the 2 fastest growing cities since the last recession. These cookie-cutter MCM-looking condos are replacing houses torn down expressly for that purpose everywhere you look. Our daughter moved there 8 years ago and her little 1930s bungalow has now nearly tripled in value!! It’s out of control, one has to really feel for average-wage young folks or teachers, nurses, cops trying to buy a house in Denver or any number of overpriced places, but the next recession may yet take prices down a peg or 3.
That’s happening here too, not because more people want to live there, but rather developers and large-scale renters like FirstKey ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/eviction-filings-and-code-complaints-what-happened-when-a-private-equity-firm-became-one-citys-biggest-homeowner/2018/12/25/995678d4-02f3-11e9-b6a9-0aa5c2fcc9e4_story.html ). These companies are moving very fast, often buying houses within a day of them being listed.
I despise private equity.
The aging, now old Eastern Block Soviet architecture and architects have found new places to exist, to be revived, in the fair cities of “the west”, or so it seems. Beauty and architectural uniqueness, as well as architectural integrity have seemingly been abandoned in the name of cost. Brick, mortar, even steel have been sacrificed for far cheaper wooden expedient, ultimately shorter lifetime, construction projects. Sigh!
That first image is so…beautiful. Sexing up a Rambler, go Curtis! Liking the no-nonsense Rambler, in a world of SPIN we need a few honest citizens.
Ramblers, Falcons, and Chevy IIs seem to be the ultimate hipster-mobile of late. I can’t quite wrap my brain around why, but I’m most certainly not a hipster!
Don’t forget A-body Mopars. Really, you would think that the weird, first generation Valiants and Lancers would be the most popular hipster-mobile. I suspect the only reason they aren’t has more to do with that there simply aren’t that many in decent shape left than anything else.
This is a lovely post-Romney Rambler that I wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen in! Glad to see that it’s an honest car with just a few laugh lines around the edges after a lifetime of use. To change the subject, I wonder if Studebaker Larks have survived at the same frequency that Ramblers of this generation have?
Portland isn’t the only place to see some Ramblers, there’s some Rambler fans in Argentina as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g47BdxYj3Iw
About 321 units were made iirc from ’66 to ’68 in the Santa Isabel plant. Ramblers had the 225″ Tornado Jet engine. They were in the top 3 of most expensive cars of Argentina. I think this particular station wagon won an Autoclasica award for its neat restoration.
Interesting car — Who wouldn’t go for a luxury Ambassador with 3-on-the-tree.
But why not spring for even a driver’s side mirror!?
Curtis is a very talented photographer. Much sophistication to his scenes and composition.
My grandfather traded in a ’60 Rambler Super on a new 660 sedan in December of 1964. Three on the tree with a 232 six in what I think was Barcelona Medium Taupe. I never appreciated either of those cars when I was growing up, yet I’d love to have the ’65 now. The styling really had no sex appeal, but it was clean, proportionate, and functional. The ’65 got turned in on an “executive” used ’69 Rebel, in 1970.
We visited Portland a couple of years ago for the first time, and I loved it. I could see myself living there, but my s/o – not so much.
You have to hand it to Rambler with these, going up against the big three may not have panned out but this body looks right on the mark for 1965 styling trends. The 65 Classics were never my favorite front end of this bodystyle but I think the… (sorry AMC fans) …ugliness of the more noteworthy Marlin may have unfairly tainted it for me, because it looks perfectly nice here(and Darren’s great looking hardtop!)
Thank the ’63 Buick Special for inspiration.
Your very kind! It rather made my day, after slogging away on that one in the storage unit (seen behind) for a “walk thru the desert” amount of time. Hence the reference to mental aberration.
Those photos almost make the Rambler look like the radioactive Malibu in the film Repo Man.
Good call on the ‘Repo Man’ reference. I can see a ’64 Malibu sedan driven by an old guy wearing sunglasses with just one lens being be right at home careening around the streets of Portland.
A very pretty car indeed .
Sadly by the next model year it was out of style .
-Nate
This model is the car my Dad might have bought but didn’t (at least the station wagon version).
He owned two Classic wagons in a row (a ’61 and a ’63). In 1965 we were moving yet again (my Dad’s job in the early days made it a regular event) and had just vacated our house, staying in a nearby motel off route 40 in Catonsville. He was coming back from work, someone waved him to turn left in front of them, but the guy in the other lane didn’t get the same memo, ended up totalling the ’63. My grandmother was staying with us in the motel babysitting (wasn’t quite old enough to be trusted to watch my sibling) and I remember her picking shards of glass out of my Dad’s skin (still wonder why, if it had safety glass).
He had to report to work at his new job, as it was beginning of summer we stayed with grandparents (we never lived closer than about a 4 hour drive from grandparents, this happened to be the closest place to them we were to live). I guess Dad flew up to his new job and ended up buying a ’65 Olds F85 wagon to replace the Classic. That was it for AMC in our family.
Interestingly, the same company ended up transferring my Dad for a brief stint working in the south, but then back to that same location he’d hired into, though we moved to a different town the 2nd tour, in our neighborhood lived the owner of the local AMC dealer…which I think later became the Honda dealer after AMC got bought out…we’d moved to yet another location (this time it took; haven’t moved from there in almost 43 years) very distant so I didn’t get a chance to see the transition myself.
Nice car, but still had the old trunion suspension…wonder if anyone still knows how to work with them. I still wonder why Dad bought a ’63 so soon after the ’61 (he did buy cars frequently in his younger years, but 2 years is pretty short). Think it had to do with the ’61 getting sandblasted on the drive from LA area when we moved to Pittsburgh in ’61 (can you imagine doing that in the early 60’s? Dad didn’t often follow trends) though it’s one question I never asked him; Mom wouldn’t remember or care, so can’t ask her.
While the early sixties Ford Falcon typically gets the nod as a hipster-mobile, I don’t think it makes a lot of difference with just about any first generation compact being acceptable, depending on the shape and how mechanically-inclined the said hipster might be. Old Ramblers like the feature car fit that theory.
I think it’s usually the Falcon simply based on the huge sales numbers those things put up in the first years; there’s simply way more of them still around in survivor condition than any of the others. Combine that with ultra-simple, basic construction that’s easier to keep mobile, too.
The ‘Dutch Angle’ like first photo gives this non-threatening Rambler a cool, almost sinister look.
I spent a day in Portland a few years back after not having been there for perhaps two decades. I too was struck by how much of the small-building fine-grain streetscape that defined the city centre has disappeared, replaced by relatively generic mid-rise condominiums. It was nice to see the food truck block thriving, but its days must be numbered as well – if they’re not already up.
Similar pressures in Vancouver have meant many one and two-storey (lower rent) commercial spaces disappearing in neighbourhood centres throughout the city, replaced by four and six-storey residential developments with anonymous concrete ground floor commercial frontages. The additional density has meant noticeably more (and welcome) local services, greater walkability, and better transit – but some things are lost as well.