One of the problems with owning a collector car, aside from spousal nagging, is where to store it, especially in the off-season of winter storms in certain latitudes. Even the South has been buried in recent weeks under two-foot snowfalls.
There is a truism along the lines that one man’s misfortune is another’s good luck. And so it is with storing your four-wheeled treasure: a former auto dealership facility.
As everyone knows, the current economic recession’s effects are especially hard-felt around the Motor City, on account of the roughly 38% drop from a 16-million-unit sales year to one of “merely” 10-million cars and trucks. This is on top of the nationwide real estate burst bubble from fraudulent mortgages that is highly concentrated in Florida, Nevada and California—and Detroit.
There is now a new, and nationwide trend as a result of the auto industry’s anguish about 2,000 closed auto dealerships from coast to coast are in play. These came about from (1) GM and Chrysler being forced to cut off low-selling franchises (although a “cash and carry my vote” Congress is meddling some here), (2) GM eliminating complete dealership networks by discontinuing Pontiac and Saturn, and (3) just the normal friction of business failures as the economy is in the deepest and longest recession since the great depression.
So, almost suddenly, there is a huge new surplus of auto dealership properties. A recent wire service story for newspapers identifies a variety of “rehabs” for these former sales-and-service emporiums, such as office buildings, schools, other large-scale retail uses and even art galleries. My eye was caught by the reference to a Columbus, Ohio, “Byer’s Chrysler showroom” being bowed into design studios for an art school.
Back in ancient history, my father bought a 1948 DeSoto and then a 1949 Plymouth from George Byers DeSoto-Plymouth at the corner of Brook and Broadway in Louisville, Kentucky. I remember that a Columbus dealer owned the dealership, so there must be a connection. The Louisville DeSoto-Plymouth facility was thoroughly modern with, as I recall an art deco curved-glass showroom window.
But it also must have been one of the last of the multi-story urban dealership buildings, at a time when dealers were abandoning land-locked downtown “auto rows” in favor of the suburbs. That is where the postwar customers were moving, and where a dealership could spread out over many acres for storage and used car display.
I fondly remember that the third floor of Byer’s Louisville store housed the body shop, where students from the nearby high school (mine) were sometimes permitted to examine the results of highway carnage as part of their informal education. Byer’s DeSoto-Plymouth, though, disappeared long before the brands were killed off by Chrysler because it lay in the path of Interstate 64 southward from a new bridge over the Ohio River.
When I bought my first “collector” around 1971, a 1941 Plymouth, there were a number of modern — but failed dealership properties along “Dreamcruise” Woodward Avenue on the south side of Pontiac, then already a failing community. Fortunately, Uncle D, as my wife and kids called the Plymouth, was no restored beauty requiring a weatherproof roof over it, so I did not have to test the old-dealership storage system. I had enough yard- and driveway-room for both Uncle D and a couple of modern Ford products.
But today’s car collectors may well benefit from the newly available auto showroom and service areas being made available across the country by Detroit’s current woes. A smart entrepreneur with a bankroll could even syndicate the misfortune, buying up or leasing abandoned dealerships to rent out for collector car (not to mention boat and RV) storage.
Car collectors who are loaded with dough, of course, usually have their country place with rehabbed barns or even modern Butler buildings for their hobby, or at the least can add up to a four-car garage as part of their residence.
I know one collector who bought an abandoned gas station property for conversion to six-car inside storage. Some others I know rented space in the one-time Packard factory in Detroit, but ran into security problems with professional thieves. Several of the nation’s premier car museums allow local collectors to store their cars as part of the museum displays—if they are museum-quality and provide sufficient visitor lure. This is a good deal for both collector and museum.
But the masses are without such good fortune. The good ol’ boys who may combine rod-and-custom artistry with shade-tree mechanical skills, found in every village across America, represent a largely untapped market for renting collector car storage space in former dealership buildings. Otherwise, their treasures sit bare in the backyard or jammed into a garage while the family cars have to deal with the elements, which in the North may entail spending 15 valuable minutes clearing off the ice or snow before heading to work – if you are still employed as the economy languishes.
So where, you may ask, did I park my ’65 Comet convertible when my wife insisted she wanted her garage back for the winter? By good chance or design, I was tipped by Woodward Avenue’s Vinsetta Garage to drive-in rental space in a secure, heated, one-time Chrysler defense (World War II vintage) plant in Warren for what I considered a bargain price of $85 per month.
The Comet is now enjoying its second winter vacation there, about ten miles from where I live. It might even be warmer than some people who faced with huger increases in heating costs have turned their thermostats down.