I’m still having fun with these old color pictures that I find on the web. Here are a few more to share, and this time I’ll concentrate on driveways and alleys. Some images are slightly out of focus, some are off-center, etc. Realities from a time when a photo’s result wouldn’t be known until developed later. Still, there’s much to discover in these images, particularly for the car-inclined.
Great pics, my friends brother had a silver blue charger my aunt in Massachusetts had a black and white buick, my brother wrecked a 58 Pontiac star chief hardtop in The field s, an uncle had a 59 olds… Lots of memories
Wow, that Chevy wagon photo is mid-century fabulous! In the last photo, is that a DS wagon? Looks 50 years ahead of anything else in this post!
The lead photo with the adobe house and ’52 Cadillac though, that’s the pairing for me!
GREAT photos – keep em coming!
Yes, a DS wagon with a large roof luggage box.
DS Break roofs are fibreglass not ideal for a rooftop box
The Cadillac in the background is actually a ’55.
What really caught my attention were the two houses in the background that were either adobe or finished to look like adobe. The house on the right has a clearly-visible evaporative cooler on the roof, too. They work beautifully when the climate is dry enough.
The 58 Pontiac photo is a study in contrasts. One step up on the Sloan ladder, it is parked in the low rent district of a city. The well worn and patched cedar shingle roof occupies the same skyline as the new high rise office building in back of it. A city in transition.
Actually, the -pink/white `58 Pontiac is a rare Canadian “Pathfinder”–equivalent to the Chieftain here. Car looks brand-spankin’ new and what a contrast with the….er,….uh, ‘structures’ behind it!
I’m loving that Edsel. I probably would have bought one when they were first released had I been alive and of driver’s age – I love cars that are quirky.
The Pontiac shot is by Fred Herzog, who emigrated from Germany to Vancouver as a young man in the early 1950s. He shot extensively in Vancouver and elsewhere on Kodachrome. Some of his photos have already been seen here on CC.
https://www.equinoxgallery.com/our-artists/fred-herzog/
The photo looks to have been taken in Strathcona, one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Vancouver and largely slated for demolition in the 1960s as part of a planned freeway/urban renewal project that would have brought freeways into the city centre. Large-scale protests stopped the freeway, and although some of Strathcona has disappeared significant parts of it have been slowly restored, and Vancouver is possibly the only major North American city without a downtown freeway.
For fellow urban planning nerds like me, there’s an interesting period documentary made by the city, largely focused on the Strathcona area.
Replace the Pontiac with a 2001 Hyundai Accent, and you would swear the photo was shot in New Orleans just yesterday. Lots of these old relics are still around.
Nice pictures and part of why I don’t want to live in the past .
-Nate
Transformational styling change from the ’67 Charger to the iconic ’68. The closest comparison on such an epic level, in more recent times, was Chrysler going from the ’93 Dynasty/New Yorker to the LH cars.
What a totally fun set of pictures!
The thing that got my attention the most was the second to last picture of the huge Chrysler. The way that picture was taken makes the car look bigger than the tiny garage behind it! I don’t think that car goes with that garage. lol.
Wow, that 58 Pontiac lives in a tired neighborhood!
The ’58 Pontiac was shot in Vancouver by a well known amateur photographer named Fred Herzog. Google the name if you like this type of photography, or Vancouver for that matter!
I’m just old enough to remember when the world looked like this, thanks for posting these.
Just looked up Fred Herzog. The vivid colo(u)rs of his photo made me think “Kodachrome” and sure enough, he did shoot in that, and often at a time when relatively few photographers were using a lot of color film. Wow, thank you for the reference!
These shots, all of which are of houses that are either modest (at best) or just old, shows why so many Americans were in love with flashy big cars at the time; they were something new and stylish that they could afford, unlike new and stylish housing.
We had 8 kids in a ramshackle old 3 bedroom house but a brand new ’58 Pontiac Chieftain that required a small lean-to added to the unattached garage accommodate it’s length.
Hot Dog! That big green Chrysler is one fine looking car.
Love the 1970 Chrysler 300 sedan. Always found these to be attractive cars and imposing!
Nice combination of the 1959 Olds, 1967 El Camino, 1963 Olds and 1968 or 69 Ford F-100 with the camper parked in an alleyway. Wonder where that could be?
What a contrast between that pink/white 58 Pontiac in the slums and the red 60 Chevy wagon in sparkling suburbia, probably taken not too many years apart.
I love the Charger in the top shot, and never stop being amazed at how old a 10-11 year old car (like that Cadillac across the street) looked in the mid 60’s. That shot is also proof that those little white mini picket fence sections never looked good.
Didn’t anyone notice that beautiful ’57 Buick? Would love to have one in that condition.
Oh heck yeah, I admired it for several minutes before scrolling on. My grandmother had a ’55 Century, but I like this so much better.
I did 🙂 And all of those incredibly tall TV antennas on the nearby roofs.
Back in the 50’s, my Uncle worked for his Uncle, who’d been in the Navy during WWII and got into radio such that he opened a radio/TV business when he returned to civilian life. In my Uncle’s obituary it states that he used to claim to have installed “all” the rooftop antennas in the area he lived. They were UHF antennas (I never lived within 200 miles of where my Grandparents/Uncle lived and always thought it odd that their TVs tuned on the UHF band, whereas the ones I was used to tuned on VHF (and we moved around a fair amount, so comparing to more than one location).
Unfortunately the Uncle who owned the business died pretty young, in 1965.
My Uncle passed in 2016, along with his 2 brothers (coincidentally) wiping out a whole generation of their family in a single year.
The Charger, ’58 Pontiac, and ’57 are a real treat visually, but I found the El Camino to be very interesting. It might be an SS 396 (or clone), with possibly a Pontiac style tachometer on the hood, and what looks like a siren on the left front fender.
The 4th photo. Looks like the backend of storefronts along the Main Street of the old part of town. Many a store owner lived upstairs or rented out the space as indicated by the laundry hanging on the back porch.
Today, this area would be full of hip bars and sushi restaurants.