In-Motion Classic: 1990 Mercury Grand Marquis LS – Leftover Deluxe Brownie

1990 Mercury Grand Marquis LS. Downtown, The Loop, Chicago, Illinois. Thursday, March 2, 2023.

I love chocolate.  For most of what has been almost a quarter-century of working in the insurance industry, I’ve had easy access to chocolate treats in the office, whether in a breakroom, in a candy bowl at the accountant’s desk, or as part of a meal served during a meeting or team-building exercise.  Our department recently had a build-your-own-waffles event to celebrate some recognition we had collectively received.  Generally speaking, I have strong willpower and have been able to maintain my health and fitness goals often by looking the other way when such things are going on during the week.  It ain’t always easy, and I’m not going to lie.

1990 Mercury Grand Marquis LS. Downtown, The Loop, Chicago, Illinois. Thursday, March 2, 2023.

I’m all-in on my dietary cheat days, but I save them for weekends.  This doesn’t mean I pretend not to know that there’s a small, neatly arranged pile of rich, moist, delicious-looking brownies sitting on a plate on a filing cabinet less than a flying rubber band’s distance from my cubicle.  This chocolatey abundance usually ends up in a place I pass every time I need to leave my desk for some reason.  I’m not sure if other people in the office simply don’t know these leftover brownies are there, but only a handful more of these baked treats will disappear over the course of the day.  Ordering too few of something is worse than ordering too many, and the planners want to make sure there are enough to go around.

1990 Mercury Grand Marquis LS. Downtown, The Loop, Chicago, Illinois. Thursday, March 2, 2023.

Still, I hate to see such things to go waste.  These poor brownies sit there, looking all forlorn and delectable, unwanted by my other insurance cohorts who seem simply above having just one more sweet indulgence from the previously held meeting.  And then what happens?  The remaining brownies get thrown out, or in the case of the recent waffle celebration, almost two entire Solo cups’ worth of semi-sweet chocolate chips go straight into the trash, after maybe the second day of sitting there.  Not on my watch.

1990 Mercury Grand Marquis factory brochure page, as sourced from www.oldcarbrochures.org.

I’ve never been really poor, not even when I was a college student and a twice-a-week regular at the local plasma center basically selling my immune system, but I know what it’s like to be hungry.  Subsisting almost entirely on mac-and-cheese and canned tuna for a short period in my early twenties gave me a real appreciation for things like extra pepperoni, the occasional name-brand soup, and actual meat in my freezer versus reconstituted whatever I was eating at the time.  Throwing away good brownies or chocolate chips just seems wrong on so many levels.  These are usually top-tier brownies, made with good ingredients.  So, what do I do about this situation?  I use the resealable container in which I had brought my lunch from home and load up just a few treats to take home with me for the weekend.

1990 Mercury Grand Marquis LS. Downtown, The Loop, Chicago, Illinois. Thursday, March 2, 2023.

Maybe it was because of this recent waffle event that I had chocolate on the brain, but the very first thing I thought of when I saw this Grand Marquis LS coming southbound at the intersection of Monroe and LaSalle on a Thursday was a big, goopy, decadent, flying brownie on turbine fin wheels.  So rich.  So thick.  It even had a brick-like shape like a brownie, “frosted” with that vinyl roof up top.  The factory Woodrose Clearcoat Metallic paint on this example had just the smallest hint of red in it, much like the best brownie mixes.  This Grand Marquis is acres away from the impression I would later come to hold of this model, having morphed as it did into one of the main choices for basic, no-frills livery when I had first moved to Chicago twenty years ago.  This car has a presence and dignity not quite matched by some of the later, rounded designs.

1990 Mercury Grand Marquis factory brochure page, as sourced from www.oldcarbrochures.org.

I wasn’t crazy about these cars when they were new, as they reminded me more of people my grandparents’ age (and my grandparents would own three of them in a row), but I’ll go out on a limb and say this ’90 Grand Marquis represents peak Panther-platform style.  These seemed to hit their full stride years after they had been introduced for ’79, selling 110,000 units or more annually between 1984 and ’89.  Sales fell sharply by almost half to just 77,400 units in 1990, after 138,900 had found buyers the year before.  The redesigned rear-drive, full-sized cars from GM wouldn’t arrive until the ’91 model year, so we can rule that out as the cause of the Mercury’s sales drop.  There was even a new, standard driver’s side airbag for ’90.  The truth is that these cars were in their twelfth year of production by that point, and that’s a really long time.

1990 Mercury Grand Marquis LS. Downtown, The Loop, Chicago, Illinois. Thursday, March 2, 2023.

Similar to my heroic rescue of discarded chocolate treats from their filing cabinet exile, I wonder about the circumstances around this car’s ownership.  Looking like it had been pampered for most of its life, I would like to think it had belonged to the current owner’s grandparents.  Few people would wind up with a car like this by accident or sheer coincidence.  No… perhaps all 213.6 inches long of this brown beauty was purposely selected and rescued from the indignity of an estate sale to complete strangers.  Many of us readers at CC have either witnessed firsthand or read in the comments about someone else’s account of watching a once-babied car devolve into everyday transportation, with the battle scars of regular use (and sometimes abuse) becoming increasingly apparent.

1990 Mercury Grand Marquis LS. Downtown, The Loop, Chicago, Illinois. Thursday, March 2, 2023.

Even if this car was a relatively new purchase for its current owner, it had regular, non-temporary plates on it and looked washed, waxed, and more importantly, maintained.  External appearances are a good predictor of pride of ownership, and I’d guess that this Grand Marquis’s fuel-injected, 150-horsepower 5.0 liter V8 engine and four-speed automatic overdrive transmission were in fine running order to move around its two tons.  The LS was the nicer Grand Marquis, complementing the entry-level GS, with both subseries being available as a four-door sedan and Colony Park station wagon.  The LS sedan came standard with $500 dollars’ worth of interior upgrades over the GS that included nicer seats and lighting.  I’d have spent that extra cash, though the GS was still very nice.

1990 Mercury Grand Marquis LS. Downtown, The Loop, Chicago, Illinois. Thursday, March 2, 2023.

I have come to appreciate the style of these Grand Marquises only more with time, now even able to mostly overlook the 1984 – ’85 Buick LeSabre-aping taillamps on the 1988 – ’91 cars.  This one looked positively delicious.  Still, there’s that point after bringing a leftover brownie home that one realizes that in order to fully enjoy it, one must eat that bad boy.  To have a big, brown brougham like this Grand Marquis and not luxuriate in its trappings from behind the wheel at least occasionally would seem a shame.  I would certainly take this car out from time to time, even if not during morning rush hour in a busy financial district.  It would be a balancing act between preserving this beautiful car and consuming it in little, well-savored bites.  Ultimately, my gut feeling is that the owner is making all the right decisions.

Downtown, The Loop, Chicago, Illinois.
Thursday, March 2, 2023.

Brochure photos were as sourced from www.oldcarbrochures.org.