(first posted 1/12/2019) Curtis Perry uploaded these exquisite photos of a ’59 Buick, a car from a time where so many cars looked like they wanted to maul you to death. Sound familiar?
At least with today’s angry designs, the menacing visage is limited to the front only. The ’59 Buick looks aggressive when viewed from either end.
I don’t know what chrome-laden American barge of this era is more aggressive-looking. This or the ’59 Dodge? The ’61 Plymouth? The ’59 Chevy’s behind could scare small children, too.
I’ll take these bellicose barges over the dopey-looking designs of the time, like the ’59 Mercury which bears a striking resemblance to…
…this dim-witted, grimacing emoji.
It’s really hard to not to experience pareidolia when you look at a car like the ’59 Buick. That looks like a face, alright. The face of something angry and out for blood.
Related Reading:
CC Outtake: 1959 Buick Invicta – Why So Angry?
Vintage SIA Design History: GM’s Far-Out ’59s – When Imagination Ran Rampant – Part 1 Part 2
This ’59 Buick was owned by Rollie LeBay’s younger brother George… and his music of choice was from the Big Band era – so beware when One O’clock Jump started up out of nowhere…
Yes. My first thought was why didn’t Stephen King pick this as his haunted car?
Recall two of these ’59’s in our neighborhood back in the day. A loaded Invicta wagon and a low-optioned LeSabre sedan. Buick still had the starter under the accelerator in ’59, far after everyone else had moved it to the key. Great instrument panel with the ribbon speedometer. ’59 was also the year Buick renamed the entire lineup, jettisoning the venerable Special, Century, Super and Roadmaster (one of the greatest model names of all time) names. The angry look didn’t cut it too well with the public, as Buick languished behind Chevy, Olds and Pontiac in sales for the year.
Little they knew then the Special nameplate will be revived for the “senior compacts” for 1961 along with Skylark as the top model but Skylark supplanted the Special monicker when Buick senior compact became a mid-size/intermediate.
Love it and would only change one thing, ditch those Bellflowers, a Lady, even a very angry lady, doesn’t show her dirty bits in public.
I photographed a similar ‘59 Buick at a Saturday cruise night in Kissimee, Florida about 4 years ago. Make mine a black one – preferably an Electra hardtop. MWAHAHAHAHA!
The “Menacing” ’59s:
(from Science & Mechanics magazine, Dec. 1958)
Those are great.
Love it!
I never thought about these as “angry” when I was a kid and they were common on the roads. Perhaps the chrome, bright or pastel colors, and ubiquitous whitewalls made them look less threatening. But today, that rear end just screams PRIUS! to me.
I’ve been meaning to snap this one since it showed up in the neighborhood about a month ago, but Curtis beat me to it. With much more dramatic photos than I would have gotten.
I’ve loved this Buick since it came out. I still remember the first time I saw it in a late ’58 Motor Trend photo spread. It knocked out little car crazy me. Never looked menacing to my eye, just sleek and grinning. After the huge bulk and outrageous ornamentation of the ’58 (see below), this car was a breath of fresh air.
As a little kid I thought GM must have been pretty desperate after seeing the new 1957 Chryslers and Fords and put as much chrome and decor on their clumsy and heavy looking new 1958’s as they could in order to get people to buy them. I was right. The bodies lasted a year. Oh, the bigger ones were a restyle of the clumsy heavy looking 1957’s. It was the last year of a design tradition for GM, taken past its sell by date.
One of our neighbors, Mr. LaForge, was the first in own town of Towson to get delivery of a new ’59 Buick, a black Electra 4 dr flattop, from Brooks Buick. His picture with the car was even featured in the local paper, The Jeffersonian. Can you imagine that happening today?? A new model year really was something to celebrate back then!
When I was a kid there was an elderly couple down the street (the Hogg’s – my friends and I would snigger about that) with a low-trim 59 LeSabre sedan in black. Yes, it looked menacing.
This Buick never struck me as menacing, just eager to get moving. It was no longer a proper Buick, but then Buick had already lost its Buickness in ’57.
That picture is a bit scary looking, isn’t it?
That Buick looks ready to teach that intruding empty bag of Doritos a good lesson!
How old must that State Farm sign be on that old building? I’m fairly certain it no longer complies with corporate signage standards LOL
Who (or what) do you think ate those Doritos? 😉
“Six more payments, gentlemen, and this beautiful, 4-door luxury sedan is all mine.” – Brad Hamilton
A friend’s father traded in his ’54 Super on one of these. At the time, I thought it was a substantial downgrade. The soft suspension made it wallow like a hog and compared with the Super, it seemed cheap in every way. Another friend’s mother had a ’59 Catalina convert (See J.P.’s article); now that was a car!
The cars were angry about the rapid, sweeping social changes coming soon.
Today the cars are angry again. It could be an interesting decade approaching…
Oh, that’s rather good!
For angry looking cars it’s hard to beat the 1959 Dodge.
Wow, for the first time ever, I noticed how this car has a perfectly rectangular rear door with no dogleg to accommodate the rear wheel. A very uncommon design feature for the 50s.
While the lower body of the Buick is attractive, the ‘six-window’ greenhouse style of late ’50’s GM sedans has always looked inelegant and a little old fashioned to me. The Mercury, clearly less attractive below the beltline, nevertheless has the more elegant greenhouse. Ford sedans of the period also kept to the more modern ‘four-window’ design.
I was creeped out by a ’59 Chevy dumped in the woods on a hike in northwestern Idaho a few years ago. Something about the rear end of those are kinda creepy looking, but old cars in the woods are creepy regardless. I always wonder how did they get there and why they are there?
This one is in a woods near me. I’m wondering how it got there too.
I had a wee model of this car as a child, and I presumed it was a made-up thing like the Batmobile, so my opinions are a bit skewed. I loved it, and do still.
It’s always good to have your thinking twisted about a bit, for the avoidance of complacency. I too am firmly in the camp that says modern styling is inept and ugly, in fact, mentioned the same only days ago in the Lexus post. And yet, this Buick simply has to shine a bright light on my thoughts, looking for details.
Can I justify that the one I consider flashy-futurama-exuberance is quantatively removed from the furious maw of one of those Lexi, as both are angry in effect? I’ll try.
I’d like to say different times and better values and it was all tongue-in-cheek and various other honeyed nonsense arising from what’s actually just nostalgia, but the truth may be more prosaic, I suspect. Modern cars are following a current aesthetic trend, a relatively extreme one for this punter, of slashes and frowns and false vents and diffusers and paraphenalia various that may possibly be unimportant for your 20 mph traffic-clogged commute. The fifties extremes, which have long been celebrated as the flowing of optimistic excess, were no more useful: and, importantly, far, far more dangerous. Today’s frowners (which really can move at astonishing speed) are constrained in their extravagance by the need to crash safely, meaning all sorts of hard points aren’t really alterable with tech as we currently know it. Thus the variability of the ’50’s excesses, the fin-on-a-fin, the Dagmars, the weeny curved screen pillars, the (heavy) chrome outlining (and infill!), the see-through glasshouse with no head restraints or belt bits, they can’t be built-in now. Philosophically, I’m tempted to say the constraints of now is what’s making the cars grumpy, but that’d be stretching things a tad. But it does mean the wildness of the current aesthetic must be constrained into controlled gestures rather than ever-crazier bits of stuff actually sticking out (and up, and down, and around) of then.
In short, it’s not an angry world any more than it was in 1959, and the two fads are just a passing trend of style. One was still able to use masses of heavy poisonous-to-make chromium, was unconstrained by sensible rules, and happened to occur at a time of peak US success, which it is now taken to reflect. The other had none of those available to it, and is coinciding with what feel like pretty dark times for many, which it taken to reflect. The original historical imposition was never true, and the current imposition by people of my age on the new cars isn’t either.
Personally, I much prefer the aesthetic of the late ’50’s fad simply because of the freedoms it had, and the fact that heavy shiny splotches and curlicues and rockets and shiny enclosed glassy spaces will always dazzle a non-artistic person more than current materials can. To me, the modern ones manage the unlikely combination of being wild and bland at the same time.
Anyway, Lexus or Buick, I’m not looking either of them in the eye in a back alley on a dark night on my own. Curtis Perry’s sublime photos show why.
I scare easily.
The 1959 Buick is a spectacularly styled car – best of the GM 1959s. It was our family car, and my dad loved his like it was the greatest car ever. He waxed it thoroughly every weekend. He told me it had 45 beveled free-floating rectangles in the grille and he cleaned each of them like they were jewels. It was a two door LeSabre with a special paint trim that he had ordered. It was the car my mom used to learn to drive.
I was born, he was driving a junked Dodge, and he got my grandmother to co-sign right after he found work after being laid off from US Steel. My dad was 22 years old and aimed high for a working blue-collar dad living with his wife and kids in his mom’s house.
He was so proud of that car. We have dozens and dozens of photos of him tenderly caring for it.
Payments were too much. He was able to keep it until it was repossessed. It about broke his heart. By about that time, he had so many family responsibilities, he couldn’t mourn his loss. So – for the rest of his life, when a 1959 Buick appeared, in a car show, a junk yard of a photo – you would hear my old man sigh and hear a catch in his throat when he saw it.
I was too young to have many memories of it. However, I grew up in a family that considered this car an auto icon.
I was planning on taking another shot of the Chin’s Chinese Restaurant sign, which rivals the Palms Motel sign, as far as I’m concerned. This is about 42nd and Broadway in Portland.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/curtisperry/33122125150
https://www.flickr.com/photos/curtisperry/84286006
But Chin’s was closed that night, but thankfully, this beautiful Buick was just one block away. A ’59! And how often do you come across those? I love the canted headlights! Just like a ’58-60 Lincoln. I have to say that the rear end leaves a bit to be desired. However, that front end does look a bit fierce to me. Downright menacing if you look at it too long…
This is my car in Portland, Oregon! I’ve just swapped a new motor so she’ll be mauling pedestrians soon again!
Peak Buick, it had style it wasnt a barge yet cleaner design than the overwrought chrome laden tank of 58.
FANTASTIC moody pictures ! .
I didn’t like these nor the Chevies when new but they’ve grown on me as I age, probably closer mindset to the intended buyers then .
The twice pipes need to be chromed and a good crossover near the engine to smooth out the roar .
-Nate
Great pictures, the fact that the interior is lit up, especially in the first shot while the other, lesser cars are dark inside, gives a ghostly vibe to the Buick.
But it is just an old Buick, it can’t really hurt you, or can it !!!
I’m not even a fan of tinted windows, but that car needs them. But not limo, narcmobile blackout tint, just dark enough not to clearly see inside. It would be much more menacing.
Don’t agree with your assessment of the Mercury. It clearly shows the way forward with its rectangular shape which was a dominant 1960s look.