New York City Signs 20191025

A Place to live out your car dreams.

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New York City, and indeed the whole tri-state area is NOT known for being car friendly. We’re known for traffic, car swallowing potholes, pre-horseless-carriage bridges and roadways. The lane lines on the roads don’t even match up from block to block. Driving and Parking are hotile here. The Nickname for the US-495, The Long Island Expressway is “The Distressway” or “The worlds longest parking lot”.

A car is a huge liability here, and many New York City natives, never get, never got and don’t want a drivers license. You don’t need one. In the city you can walk, ride a citibike, take a cab/uber/lyft skateboard, scooter, subway or tram just about anywhere you want to go much faster and cheaper than driving. Then you don’t need to find a parking space (there aren’t any, anyway) once you get there.

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People pay $50k for a parking space that then has a “monthly maintenance fee” attached. If I owned a space like that i’d paint the white lines myself! People pay from $400 to $800 per month to park their cars. Street Meters charge $10 per hour, they take credit cards. Door dings and scratched bumpers are virtually assured. you see old wrecks like this car below everywhere, well, maybe not….

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So of course NYC is the perfect place for the famous Cooper Classics Collection of cars. They are a block from my apartment and I always keep an eye on what they’re doing. They find rare european cars, restore them and i see them drive in, drive out and drive around the neighborhood.

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I was riding my bike home from my butcher and I smelled the old familiar pre 1973 smell of carbuerated richly tuned hydrocarbons (that would be pre-pollution controlled auto exhaust from a high performance engine). I heard a wonderful engine sound. Not unexpectedlly I caught up with a ‘barn find‘ of a relic. Though we were about a mile from my apartment I knew exactly where this car was going. I took the most direct route, beat him there (bicycles are much faster than cars in NYC), set up my camera and waited about 3 minutes for him to arrive.

One of these Mercedes 300 Gull wings cost about $7,295 new in 1955, which was incredibly expensive back then. One recently sold for over 4 million dollars. Yes this barn find of a wreck parked on the street is worth well over 1 million dollars.

Check out the old man getting out, and the young guy, who parked it in the garage, getting in.

https://videopress.com/v/A5EjsPVY?preloadContent=metadata

Turn up the volume and listen to the sound of the gull wing door closing in the above video. 64 year old, It’s a Mercedes! Maybe sometime in the future i’ll have pictures of it fully restored.