Wow, it is hard to believe it has been a week since CC’s Great Auburn Adventure. Earlier this evening I completed the first part of my guided tour of this historic and amazing museum, but in the meantime I had to share these great pictures taken by CC reader Dan Cluley.
If you ever have the opportunity, you MUST see this museum. It is fantastic. Special thanks to Dan, who braved the cold night after dinner to swing by and take these shots before heading home. Well done, Dan!
Dan, you are a good man to go get these pictures. I didn’t see the museum after dark, but this is quite the wonderful spectacle.
The museum in Auburn is indeed a special place, and has a place in my heart because I was privileged to have visited it in 2007 with a friend who soon thereafter passed away.
The art deco beams, columns, lights, and flooring nicely complement the period cars.
The first time I went there, I stopped dead in my tracks as soon as I entered the showroom. Amazing space. The building had been used for light manufacturing for years, so I asked one of the staff how the light fixtures had survived. She said when the building was acquired, the old chandeliers and wall sconces were found thrown into a storage closet. Most of the fixtures now in place are original, having been restored after their decades being treated as trash. A few of the fixtures were beyond repair, so were used as patters for reproductions.
Man, those light fixtures. I want one. Wow, those are beautiful.
Art Deco is my weakness…
“Auburn showroom” image for sale at eBay now:
Automobile showrooms were the palaces of the early 20th Century!
As a child and into my teens I was privileged to be able to relish the splendor of the Cadillac showroom in San Francisco; after all, my Dad was a Cadillac owner!
It was known as the Don Lee Cadillac building. Don Lee was a pioneer broadcaster in San Francisco; the building, designed by the same architect who did several well-known and still-famous San Francisco hotels, was completed in 1912. Don Lee had his KFRC radio studios on the upper floors and two towers on the roof supported the wire transmitting antenna.
For years it was a fixture on San Francisco’s Automobile Row. Rival Packard dealer (and distributor for all of California) Earle C. Anthony built an equally splendid building; designed by famed Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck. Anthony’s radio station KFI was in Los Angeles and could be received at night in San Francisco; but that didn’t stop him from building two DUMMY towers on the roof, with “KFI ANTHONY” in red letters that lit up at night.
By the 1960s, the Cadillac dealership had expanded its service facility into an annex that extended to the next street.
The Don Lee Cadillac building still survives as a multiplex movie theater. The Cadillac crest and “CADILLAC” lettering over the main door have been preserved. The magnificent showroom serves as the lobby; the former service department building was razed and replaced by the cinemas themselves. The Earle C. Anthony Packard Building is now the British Motors dealership.
Photo of the Cadillac showroom in the Don Lee Building from the Bay Area Radio website:
Thanks for sharing this history. The timing of the great earthquake certainly worked in favor of the emerging car industry in enabling these dealership palaces to be built.
This is a good reminder for me to take a trip past one of the few or perhaps only early car dealerships (1915) that still exists in Melbourne before it is demolished to make way for a high-rise apartment building.
Wow–that looks like one of the classic movie palaces, or one of the magnificent theaters of the early 20th century. At least the showroom survives, even if the current use is a little less grand!
If there is a heaven it has to look something like this.
In Heaven you can take as many test drives as you want.
Excellent shots, Dan. The showroom at night was something that none of the rest of us saw. That is a really beautiful view.
I will echo some others that the showroom is one of the most stunningly beautiful automotive settings there is. That must have been a strange place in 1936-37, with so much beauty but mixed with an air of desperation due to plummeting sales. Very few companies go out at the top of their game, but the ACD operation certainly did.
It seems as though showrooms for “premium” brands looked like hotel lobbies while those for other brands looked like converted gas stations.
Having been in this area 3 times in 40 years, I am sorry to have to admit I’ve never made it to the ACD museum.
Heck, I was born and raised in Pennsylvania but only visited the AACA museum twice….as a 7 year old and a 57 year old.
Should be on any car fans “bucket” list.
If I lived in America, I’d go for sure.
Tom and Dan:
Busy life has kept me from checking in with CC for almost a week, but presto! I come to the site and saw your photos. Great job. At night the ACD showroom is more majestic and even a bit haunting.
But if it’s a showroom, this got me thinking. They must offer test drives, if you let them photocopy your license first. Why didn’t any of us think of that?
cheers, John/SeVair
Well, I did get a view from the driver’s seat (I climbed in and everybody was too distracted to notice my bad behavior).
The trick is not to go “Vroom vroom!” That would have attracted attention.
Yes! “What do you have in the way of a CPO Duesenberg? I would rather avoid gray interior, if possible.”
Was this a original Auburn dealership that was turned into a museum or was a typical Auburn dealership recreated to show what one looked like?
I guess the car showroom was a palace back then.
I know that in my grandfather’s day dealerships were different. You went to a dealership and the sales guy took out a big book of options and you filled out a form with all the options you wanted and paid whatever down payment/total price etc and your order was sent to the factory and a few weeks later you got a call to come down and pick your new car up. It was not like today where you picked a car and rolled off the lot with it. You actually had to wait for a car if you wanted all the options you picked to be included in the car. I do think that they kept a few new cars on the lot for sale for those folks that had to have a car right away.
It was the factory showroom, where dealers went to look, buy, get the latest information. From my understanding, it was not a dealer showroom. Quite the history here, as one vintage picture on display showed an airplane parked in this room.
Yes, a Stinson airplane. Another one of E. L. Cord’s acquisitions.
My first airplane flight was in a gull-wing Stinson. Reliant, if I remember right. Pic is not of that specific airplane, but the same type.
That does look great – I was thinking that it looked even better in pictures than it did in real life, then read that Dan went back after dark and took the pix. Very nice. And yes, it was extremely impressive and a wonderful remnant from Auburn’s glory days.
I had a chance to visit this great museum a few years ago. Behind the museum is the National Automobile and Truck Museum which is located in the former factory buildings of the Auburn Automobile Company. Both museums are well worth the visit.
I assume it must have been open to the public for viewing as well? Or would they have been restricted to the same view Dan has shared with us? (thanks Dan!) I’m kicking myself that we didn’t think to go back and have a look at night when we visited last year.
We can be thankful that whoever it was 50-plus years ago dumped the old light fittings etc in a back room rather than the back of a truck to take to the dump, and that the building occupants were more interested in using the space than gutting it and installing some corporate-branding-approved ‘modern’ fitout in it as would happen today.
John, been busy so haven’t followed up promptly on the Autoclassica meetup. Saturday is good for me. You got a preferable time?
Hi Don, I had looked back in on that last night – how about 2pm?
Good with me. North entrance opposite the museum, I’ll be wearing a red hat with ‘DLRA’ and a bellyracer embroidered on it. I’m thinking of putting a callout as a short story so others can meet up with us.
Sounds good the more the merrier.
Sometimes you stumble on someone’s tribute to the showrooms of old. This one is in Lynnport, PA. It’s a museum that also sells some cars, and very much a Hudson enclave.
Here’s an outside shot of the showroom in PA.
There is a museum in Ypsilanti, MI, which is located in a former Hudson dealership building. The focus is shared among all the makes associated with Ypsi, so they have sections dedicated to Kaiser-Frazer, Hydramatic, Corvair and Tucker (Preston Tucker lived in Ypsi), but the largest display is for Hudson. They recently hooked up with the national Hudson owner’s club and it’s now the National Hudson Museum, with this beauty in the showroom
Thanks for posting these Tom. 🙂
As magnificent as that showroom is, the display windows don’t look like much during the day. They have a pretty heavy tint film on the glass ( I suspect to protect from UV) but I thought it might be better after dark. I’d guess they turn the lights down at some point, but the wedding reception was still going on when I got back there.
The difference between the THEN and NOW is that today everything is overcommercialized and (almost) everything became “recyclable”. The real style is not represented enough in today’s automotive showrooms in general. As the cars lost their hood ornaments and chromed features instead of recyclable plastics and cheap (excuse me) “smart” designs. In many cases the only difference between the showroom and the lavatory is that no taps and no handwash basins inside the customers area.
Both the showroom building and the cars are fine pieces of quality build and art that probably will never be repeated. Good to see them preserved. In 1974 at the first dealership I worked for, (VW) a unrestored coffin nose Cord convertible covered in dust was stored in a back shop area. I recently found a early 2000’s car magazine with the now long gone (closed and turned into apartments in the 80’s) dealership’s owner standing next to the car restored to it’s former glory. I instantly recognized both.