When I was young, I had thought that the El Camino was simply a Chevelle or Malibu wagon with the rear section of the roof and cargo area lopped off – from the factory, of course. It looked like an odd conveyance, like some sort of open-top station wagon. Examples with aftermarket fiberglass roof caps looked even more strange. Why would one chop the top off of a longroof and then stick a “fake” one back on? This apparent approach seemed redundant, long before I was familiar with that word. It wasn’t until later on that I realized that most wagons had four, regular passenger doors (not including the rear tailgate) unlike the El Camino’s two, and that there was even more involved in its tooling then simply withholding the sheetmetal stampings from the top and sides of the car.
At this writing about a month ago, I had just returned from Las Vegas, having taken advantage of the three-day weekend (Presidents’ Day was that Monday) to go on a quick holiday and meet up with friends. Yes, I had been there just four months prior, but when the idea had come up in discussion during February’s low temperatures in Chicago dipping into the single digits, and with great prices on lodging and airfare, a return to Vegas was a no-brainer. I have no regrets for having gone again so soon. I have often done this thing where I book my returning flight for the day after everyone else has left. I’m starting to learn that this sort of long goodbye with Las Vegas, and in a sense with my friends, isn’t great for me.
Tom, Christine, Curt, and Stacy had all flown out the Monday morning of the night I had taken these photographs, and while I always crave time by myself to go exploring with my camera, I sometimes end up feeling a little lost with the realization that I’m now there alone. I like being by myself, and I love Las Vegas. Why does this sometimes become a big deal the moment I realize no one else is actually available to hang out with? I sat in my hotel room early that afternoon for a good ten minutes before deciding to ride the RTC Deuce bus back downtown from the Las Vegas Strip with no particular plan except to try to find some inexpensive grub for dinner. I ultimately succeeded on that last front, with some delicious street tacos purchased from a pop-up vendor parked not far from the intersection where I had photographed our featured car truck.
Downtown Container Park is there on the southwest corner of East Fremont and 7th, and though it has been there since 2013, I hadn’t really paid much attention to it until recent years. It wasn’t that its idea wasn’t novel or cool on paper. Here’s a small shopping plaza located only a few blocks east of all the action on the Fremont Street Experience, downtown’s main east-west drag. It had been built using many former shipping containers that were repurposed into storefronts, though the superstructure of this shopping center isn’t limited to just the old containers. It’s just that these large, metal boxes are its most recognizable and prominent architectural element. I mean, the place is called “Downtown Container Park”, after all.
Completed in November of 2013 on the former site of the Orbit Inn, DCP is an artful, eclectic collection of boutiques, eateries, cafes, and shops selling all sorts of wares. There’s also a large playground for kids and a stage for live performances. It took the encouragement of my friends Tom and Christine to go there for the first time last fall, after which I had wondered why I had been so indifferent to having done so before. It really is a fun, little space. Maybe my previous thought process was that I could shop anywhere, I feel like I already have enough stuff, and I also have a natural aversion to popular things. This place ended up being just offbeat enough to make me feel like I was among my people.
This El Camino could also be considered the type of vehicle that definitely didn’t conform. Studying the frames I had shot with my Canon as the Chevy crossed the intersection in front of Downtown Container Park, it also occurred to me that much like the intermodal containers used to construct much of that plaza, the El Camino also seemed like a container that originally been designed as one thing, but had been reconfigured and repurposed into something different. I know these are technically considered trucks, but nine-year-old Joe would have argued with you about that until you walked away in annoyance.
Nope. This is a long, two-door passenger car missing a roof and most of its passenger compartment. I’m not saying I think so now, and I’ve written about the Chevy El Camino and related GMC counterparts enough times here at CC to provide some indication that I genuinely like them. It’s just that a Chevy Silverado, by contrast, seems like an actual truck: conceived, designed, and purpose-built as one. This generation of El Camino started on someone’s drawing board as a long Chevelle. “It’s a pickup and a passenger car. It’s El Camino,” says the sales brochure. That sums up my premise.
The sun had already completed its descent when this white Chevy appeared, so with the limited natural light and using only my camera’s automatic settings, I wasn’t able to get a clear shot of the badge on the front fender, but if my deduction after looking at the sales brochure is correct, I believe there’s a 350 V8 under the hood of this one. It had a pretty exhaust note, but I can’t tell what a four-barrel example would sound like relative to the 2-bbl. 350. It was also riding on classic and iconic Chevy Rally Wheels, which should please some purists.
All of this is not to say that I think that repurposing one thing for something else is bad in any way. I love adaptive reuse, and I think this approach echoes many aspects of the human condition as we, ourselves, find ways to keep adjusting and readjusting to changes in our respective environments, whether or not all of those things are within our control. I am not exactly what I was even last year. We can only hope and pray that good things will be fashioned in our lives out of challenges and circumstances that had started out as something completely different. Some days, I feel like a repurposed container, full of life and creativity despite the imperfections. In that sense, both Downtown Container Park and the El Camino have gained an extra measure of my respect simply for existing as metaphors that many things in life are malleable.
Downtown Las Vegas, Nevada.
Monday, February 17, 2025.
Brochure pages were sourced from www.oldcarbrochures.org.
I love out of the box thinking, and therefore these – as our Southern Hemisphere neighbors would call “Utes” – have long fascinated me. Neither fish nor fowl, car nor truck, they’ve also created cognitive dissonance for me around not being purely anything and therefore I’m somewhat suspicious of why someone would want to buy something that is not entirely functional as any of the things that either a car or a truck might do. Of course, ultimately that “not entirely functional as anything” notion kind of took over vehicle design and here we are living in a world full of small cross-overs where notions of purity don’t count for much.
I’ve never imagined owning one of these El Caminos myself, but I do have to say that seeing your photos of this one cruising in the warm paved flatness of Vegas makes me feel that it’s probably in its perfect element there. It doesn’t really have to do anything other than look good (and apparently sound good)…and that it does.
I’ll also say Joe that your enthusiasm for Vegas as a gathering place for friends is infectious, and I’m starting to think of it as perhaps a place where I might do the same. It seems that the city has perfected itself as a place easily accessible (on short notice) with things to do for nearly anyone. In the past, I’d assumed that the things to do all involved drinking, gambling, and faux-Elvis…stuff that I have little interest in so far as needing to travel 2/3 of the way across the country to experience…but apparently I was wrong. And anyway, I definitely need to see and visit Container Park.
Because I live here and work, in part, in the Convention and Trade Show industry, I will agree that Joe and his friends are onto something. All of the things that make Vegas a great place to host a gathering of homebuilders, sports medicine professionals or what have you, make it a great place to host a gathering of friends. There are hundreds of cheap flights from most anywhere in the US (and the world) where there’s an airport. Las Vegas is home to over 150,000(!) hotel rooms, so there’s always a bargain to be had. There’s plenty for you and your friends to see, do, and eat. Come to Vegas, Jeff!
As for the El Camino, I’m pretty sure I know that truck. I think it belonged to a former coworker of mine who sold it before he left town. It had a hot 454 in it for a while, but he reverted it back to a small-block 350 when he got tired of paying the gas bills.
These were quiet rare in the suburbs I grew up in, enough so that other kids would sometimes point them out when we passed one on the road – it was quite a novelty. We called them “half car half trucks”; I’d never heard the name El Camino (or Ranchero).
When my parents were shopping for a car in 1976 at a Chevy dealership, I grabbed one each of all of the brochures, including one for the El Camino (https://www.ebay.com/itm/374605267898) . The first inside page foldout said “A car when you need a car” and showed some interior shots and some 3/4 views of the exterior; flip the page and the next layout said “A truck when you need a truck” and showed a rear-side view with the tailgate open. The cover and first-page shots didn’t make it obvious this wasn’t just an ordinary car – there was no rear side window, but then the Camaro didn’t have one either, and anyway the predominantly front 3/4 views didn’t make that area all that visible. So when I opened the brochure for the first time and saw “A car when you need a car”, my first thought was “well that’s faint praise…”. Was that really the best pitch Chevy could make for this thing? Like “hey, if you need a car, and don’t have one, this one will do”. Only later did I look at it again and notice there was another page behind it that showed the rear truck section with “a truck when you need a truck”.
I don’t recall seeing many El Caminos with bed caps, though they were very common on full-size trucks, particularly the design shown below which a neighbor with a Chevy square-body truck had with a jalousie window surrounded by a “bubble window” on each side, the latter sometimes tinted in various colors. The bubble window mirrored a style that was ubiquitous on ’70s customized vans. The jalousie windows by contrast were normally found only on houses, or campers and trailers which were home substitutes for when you were travelling. Their presence on the truck cap made me think the inside of these covered pickups must have had beds, carpeting on the floor/wall/ceiling, and other custom fittings. I was disappointed to find most had no interior fittings at all.