Fowler-Shinn Buick – Jenkintown, Pennsylvania
More car dealership postcards and other photos from around North America. Enjoy!
Carl F. Weissenberger Chevrolet – Toledo, Ohio
Rumble Pontiac-Buick-Vauxhall – Toronto, Ontario
Jim McKay Chevrolet – Fairfax, Virginia
Barrie Bros. Cadillac-Oldsmobile – Patchogue, New York
Gateway Chevrolet – Schenectady, New York
Johnson Buick-GMC – Aiken, South Carolina
H. Proulx Ford-Monarch – Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec
Ted Britt Ford – Fairfax, Virginia
Krieg Bros. Chevrolet – Thrall, Texas
Bob Nelson General Motors Dealership – Cranbrook, British Columbia
Schulstad AMC – Tampa, Florida
Jack Cauley Chevrolet – West Bloomfield, Michigan
Goad Cadillac – Austin, Texas
Weber Chevrolet – St. Louis, Missouri
Mazzei Pontiac-Cadillac – Antioch, California
Randolph Chevrolet – Camden, New Jersey
R.M. Horner, Inc. Buick-Pontiac-GMC – Crawfordsville, Indiana
Plains Chevrolet – Amarillo, Texas
Northland Chrysler-Plymouth – Oak Park, Michigan
Carson-Petit Mercedes-Benz, Peugeot & Mercury – Devon, Pennsylvania
Blue Grass Lincoln-Mercury – Louisville, Kentucky
Auto-Sport by Jiri – Vestal, New York
Dragonetti Datsun – San Mateo, California
John Chezik Buick – Kansas City, Missouri
Priola Motors Fiat-Peugeot-Renault – San Francisco, California
Jarrett Dodge – Hatboro, Pennsylvania (futuristic postcard from 1970)
I’m stumped about what the van is in the Bob Nelson dealership photo. Maybe a Canada specific model?
It’s a British Commer. Commer was connected with Dodge, so its presence at a GM dealer wasn’t good ‘product placement’.
British, but not a Commer (the front isn’t rounded enough and the side window is too shallow) but an Austin 152/J2 Omnivan.
Van version: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bmiht/26703271019/
Minibus: https://www.flickr.com/photos/beerdave1745/24756474052/
You can even see the ventilator in the middle of the roof.
Being a GM dealership it does seem perverse that it’s not a Bedford CA though.
Did Bedford ever make it to North America?
CAs were sold in Canada, but not the USA as far as I know. Electric CFs were imported to the USA in the mid 1980s, but badged ‘Griffon’.
M-B, Peugeot and Mercury! What an odd combination Carson-Pettit sold!
Someone traded in a 1954 Packard Clipper Panama hardtop to Barrie Brothers Cadillac-Oldsmobile in 1960, visible to the left. Hard to imagine they had it parked out front, a six year old Packard was backlot cheap orphan car by then.
I was wondering the same thing. Packards of any era were $50 cars by then, so the owner would have done better to give it to his kids instead of trying to trade it for a Caddy. It was still an excellent car regardless of value.
The Packard is a medium-price Clipper. It was probably traded on an Oldsmobile. Packard was largely selling medium-price cars by 1954.
As a ‘come-on” bait enticement, dealers used to park a usually less desirable older car they had that just happened to be in excellent condition out in front with a very cheap price soaped on the windshield. The idea was to get people to stop in, thinking how great it would be to get a car that good for little money. Once on the lot, their attention would be diverted to other more profitable cars the dealership really wanted to sell.
Sometimes a ‘bait’ car was run out anytime sales got slow…
Note that in the showroom of Barrie Brothers Cadillac-Oldsmobile, the Oldsmobiles are 1960 models, but it appears as though the convertible on the Cadillac side is a 1957 model.
A little strange that, during the “newest-is-best” era, the dealer would park a three-year-old car in such a prominent position in the showroom.
Came to say just this. Mercedes combined with Peugeot? Sure, no problem. But then to tag on Mercury at the end, when it was surely the volume seller? Weird.
In baseball it’s called covering allow the bases.
A plausible sequence of how this combination came to be: first was the Mercury dealership when those stand-alone franchises were being granted.
Next, for 1959, came a Studebaker franchise as the company was giving those to Big Three dealers to get more market coverage for the Lark. Along with Studebaker came the Mercedes-Benz franchise since South Bend had that sales arrangement with Daimler-Benz. By 1965 when Daimler-Benz sales took over its own operations as Studebaker began leaving the auto business, keeping M-B franchise was common for those established dealerships.
Peugeot was likely simply a third nameplate added in the early 1960’s since they were already handling a ‘foreign’ car. Peugeot was trying to widen and succeed in export sales to the U.S. since it was such a lucrative market then.
Fun, as always. R.M. Horner in Crawfordsville, Indiana would be about 40 minutes away from me if it still existed. And it is interesting to see the Pontiac-Buick-GMC combo before GM made that uniform in Pontiac’s final years.
Jarrett Dodge looks likely to have counted George Jetson as a loyal customer.
Rumble Pontiac -Buick used to be about six blocks from my house. I drove past it daily. My dad bought his 1988 Bonneville there. That car was so reliable he never needed to return to the dealership again.
The business closed shortly before the Pontiac division folded, and the building was repurposed as a high-end hipster European furniture store (Kartell, Studio B). Of course that promptly went down like a lead balloon, and the building was razed. A much larger structure is in place, housing a bank and a Whole Foods store.
The Rumble dealership used to run radio ads. Their jingle was, “Ramble into Rumble – you’ll see!”
Strange choice considering they didn’t sell Ramblers.
There is some baaaad architecture going on here. Oof. Midcentury brought out some decent housing designs but just about everything I see from that era is difficult to stomach. Check out Gateway Chevrolet: Build box. Make door. Make window. Cover everything else in river rock. Looks like a dermatological condition.
I do like Fowler-Shinn, Barrie Brothers, Carson-Pettit and Randolph Chevy.
The Gateway Chevrolet building doesn’t look a car dealership building to me. With it’s brick facade and small windows, it looks like it would be something like a shoe store instead.
Petricor and Eric703, Gateway Chevrolet used to be the automotive department (in a separate building across the street) for the Two Guys Department Store in Schenectady, NY (corner Lafayette and Liberty).
Thanks for this local knowledge — that explains it!
The Bob Nelson dealership looks like it used to be a McDonalds, and they left part of the golden arches standing.
Apart from the letters proclaiming its’ name, Ted Britt Ford looks like it could be the suburban industrial-park headquarters for the cool, techy but evil corporation in an ’80s TV show.
Mazzei Pontiac-Cadillac’s building looks like a restaurant with a lake view which does a big holiday meal business.
That dealership was on 18th Street in Antioch, California. Further down was Bob Long then Antioch Chevrolet and Al Eames Ford.
Whereas I was thinking how nice it was when signage wasn’t limited to obnoxious digital screens and buildings didn’t look like cookie-cutter prefab garbage that a strong breeze could carry away.
FWIW, regarding the Fowler-Shinn Buick dealer in the lead photo, a quick search shows it was at 830 Old York Road. Google street view shows a Wawa gas station now, but the retaining wall in the background right is still there, and the garage above it still stands as part of an Acura dealership.
And this beauty was originally purchased there:
http://www.classicmotorcarsonline.com/1963-Buick-Electra-225.shtml#
That dealership was near where I grew up. When I remember it (in the 1980s), it was Foy Buick, and eventually they built a bigger Buick showroom across the street. The original Buick showroom became an Isuzu showroom (Foy Isuzu).
I remember the building looking neglected, especially the art deco terraced dome. I suspect the dome was closed off from the inside; from the outside it looked as if the glass was painted, or just discolored. I don’t know when the building was demolished, but too bad, because it was a neat building. That retaining wall sure is huge, though!
For all the disdain for pickups there seems to be in the world, it is truly shocking to see a number of dealers having pickups front and center on the lot. That never happened in polite circles, did it?
Dragonetti Datsun. Plains Chevrolet. Weber Chevrolet (and I believe they are in the same location). Bob Nelson Chevrolet (in British Columbia).
Perhaps pickups are more influential than given credit for.
Eric, thanks for these. I was hoping to one day see a featured dealer I am familiar with and you delivered.
The pickups at the St. Louis dealer are the most surprising to me… and there’s several parked in prominent rows in that image, too. The Amarillo and Cranbrook dealers are likely in pickup-heavy markets (Texas Panhandle & SE British Columbia), so I’m not terribly surprised about the pickups there, though it seems the Amarillo dealer separated the trucks from the more genteel car buyers with separate showrooms. Guess there wasn’t too much cross-shopping in those days, but I wonder in which showroom the Blazers and Suburbans were placed?
Ahh, finally, one from my old home town…I grew up near Weber Chevrolet in Creve Coeur, which was originally a farming community that became a suburb in the 1960s. Weber catered to all types (still does) and would always park something interesting in that spot. George Weber did folksy tv spots on STL tv for a gazillion years. I think it’s a fairly high volume dealership chain now, but that same exact building (circa 1969) still stands today, painted gray. Take a quick read of their history, as they’ve been in business since 1902! Originally located in downtown STL, then in the Central West End, they sold a variety of interesting brands including Hupp, Moon, De Soto, etc. moon is one of my favorites as my family eventually came to own the factory building where their carriages and some cars were made, and I basically spent my childhood there (It’s now converted lofts).
I used to live down the street from where Dragonetti Datsun was. It’s now a Lights Plus (or was the last time I drove by that address), just south of a BMW dealer, the Dragonetti name is long gone. Those little trucks were big business in California.
Could Plains Chevy have been “just” a truck dealer, i.e. no cars, was that a thing? It IS in Texas after all and the sign says Heavy-Duty Trucks.
That could be just a picture of their commercial/truck facility. Jim McKay Chevrolet (also featured in this post) had a main showroom building (which it appears the cars in the photo in this post were on display in front of) and down the hill and across the street McKay had a separate Used Car lot and a separate commercial truck sales office and lot where all the pickups were displayed along with the commercial bodied trucks and vans. McKay moved a lot of commercial vehicles – and probably still do.
Well, you must be a Northern Virginia native if you know about Jim McKay’s Truck Center. Here’s a picture of it from 1993.
McKay still owns the lot, though I think it’s been their used car lot for several years now. The little former house that served as the Truck Center building is torn down now.
More likely that they had a car store next door or across the street. However occasionally you had independent stand alone truck only dealers. Now it was a Ford store but we had one in the Seattle area until about 10 years ago. Seatac Ford truck sales. They might have 8 or 10 SUVs or cars on the used lot, but otherwise it was all types of trucks small and large.
They also had the best rates around for rental trucks from a basic cargo van to dry and refer 26′ trucks and tractors. The service center was all makes and open 24hrs.
On the Blue Grass Lincoln-Mercury – Louisville, Kentucky photo are those 1971 or 1972 Mercury’s? I have a hard time telling.
These are 1971 models–the grilles are a fine horizontal bars. For 1972 the full-sized Mercury grilles used an egg crate design.
Here’s an ad for Blue Grass from 1979. Interesting pairing up Lincoln-Mercury with Jeep
Wow surprising that they give the name of the closed dealership and posting the list and invoice price. Look at the difference in the dealer’s margin between the Monarch at $1100 and the Versailles at $3300, I’m sure that Ford did similarly as well since the invoice price is $4000 more.
I couldn’t tell if they were the egg crate designs or not, that’s why I was asking, I prefer the 1971 grilles more along with the powertrain’s.
What was the deal with these old co-located gas stations/car dealers like H. Proulx Ford-Monarch/Texaco? I see these quite a bit in old photos, but they were gone by the time I was around to remember. Same owner? Some deal the automakers made with service stations?
Carson-Pettit Mercedes/Peugeot/Mercury looks more like an old rural schoolhouse than a car dealership.
The Northland Chrysler-Plymouth photo is very strange from today’s perspective. I can count at least 17 late model Chrysler and Plymouth cars that have the service bays at over capacity. Read between the lines, “When the shitbox we sold you craps out we’ll fix it as soon as we can, but we have to fix all of the other shitboxes that crapped out before yours did first. Take a number. There is coffee in the waiting area.
Both Jim McKay and Ted Britt are from my hometown of Fairfax, Virginia. My father bought every new Chevy he owned from Jim McKay Chevrolet and many Saturday night after-dinner walks were done through the Jim McKay storage lots looking for odd/unusual configurations of models and checking the Monroney stickers on the cars. Also spent a bit of time picking up parts in the 1980’s for our Monte Carlo and Citations.
I bought an Explorer from Ted Britt, which was just three blocks from my Intermediate school.
Semi-interesting fact: both Ted Britt and Jim McKay make a lot of additional revenue as storage lot landlords to almost all the other dealers in Fairfax. The manufacturers require that all dealers have a certain amount of storage space within a certain distance of the showroom facility. Britt and McKay have been around long enough to acquire the land before the area really boomed and densely developed.
We lived in Fairfax County between 1983-92. I remember both Jim McKay and Ted Britt; in fact we looked at a Taurus wagon at the latter in 1990 but did not purchase it.
The Jim McKay photo from 1967 reminds me of the huge storage lot for Don Allen Chevrolet in Pittsburgh (dealership featured in one of Paul’s earlier postcard articles), from which my mother selected her 67 Bel Air 2-door sedan. Needless to say, the Bel Airs were not in the front row!
Speaking of storing cars for sale off site check out Kellogg Idaho, the tiny home town of the massive Dave Smith Motors where Paul bought his Promaster. Random closed business, vacant lots, spaces that other business don’t use all filled with new vehicles. The kind of cool thing is that they will have entire lots devoted to a single model. So a lot with 30 Suburbans, or 50 1/2 ton crew cab 4×4 Rams.
On the Barrie Bros. dealer, what are those disks mounted on the roof?
One is Cadillac Service and the Caddy shield while I’m guessing that the other says Oldsmobile Service.
Auto-Sports by Jiri, Vestal, N.Y. look like the ‘foreign’ car dealerships I remember. Typically started out as repair garages, added a small showroom, one man and a mechanic operation. These were the years before the widespread elevation of BMW to its current status, when only the cognoscente bought the ‘ultimate driving machine’. Getting them fixed when something went wrong wasn’t the experience it is now, but that was true for most imported cars then.
Before my time in the area, but I’ve been told that Auto-Sports BMW was bought by the Chevy dealer in Endicott, NY. As of late, the building housed a car detailing (and customizing?) business, which has moved to Endicott near the BMW dealer.
Loving these great trips down memory lane. Keep them coming.
I love the sarcastic comments abut the architecture. We have to admire the marketing skills of dealers who found ways to sell multiple lines under one roof. I finally found a picture that I was seeking. it is of Parker’s Garage, Lake Luzerne, NY. I think that the Hudson is a 1955 but one of you Hudson experts could better determine this. In 1951 my grandparents ceased camping on Lake George at a public campsite. We would go for the month of July. They bought a two-story log cabin in The Town of Luzerne, five miles west of the Village of Lake Luzerne. As one who has always loved automobiles, imagine my surprise to see a Hudson dealer. It was the only dealership in town. The nearest other car dealerships were in Glens Falls, NY. It speaks of small town USA as it is a garage and a dealership. Just how many Hudson automobiles did Mr. Parker sell each year? In 1966, as a young adult, I lived in Castleton-on-Hudson, NY where there was an equivalent Dodge dealer. Since I had a new 1966 Dodge Coronet, I took it there for adjustments. Memories, gents, memories!
I love how this volume includes dealer names and locations! I’ve been scrolling through them looking for towns with dealerships that I’m familiar with.