Cherry IL, 2/12/86
(first posted 4/11/2012) My first Street Scenes post was a trial balloon of sorts. I think it’s safe to say that most of you Curbside Commenters enjoyed it. With that in mind, I’m happy to announce that Street Scenes will become a regular weekly feature here at Curbside Classic, at least until the pictures run out. Enjoy!
East Dubuque IL, 1/21/86
Do you ever get tired of seeing the same old scenery, no matter what town you’re in? Sick of SUVs and ever-present Camcords? Well join me in a trip back to a time when only Forest Rangers and ranchers drove Suburbans, AMC was still in business, and there weren’t four million cookie-cutter chain restaurants in every town with at least one traffic light.
Huntley IL, 12/27/85
You know you’re in Illinois when you see Old Style beer signs. There are still a ton of them in my area, even today. The two Cutlasses in this shot show just how popular these cars were when new. I remember seeing Colonnade Cutlass Supremes well into the late ’80s.
Loves Park IL, 12/12/85
When’s the last time you saw a front wheel drive Pontiac Phoenix? My principal in grade school had one of these, an ’80 or ’81 in burgundy. I don’t remember him having problems with it, but he did trade it in on a gunmetal gray 1986 Accord sedan, which he drove well into the Nineties.
Manteno IL, June 1987
Well, my 1976 T-Bird (with the Cream and Gold Luxury Group) is just about out of gas and it’s lunchtime, so I need to beg off and stop for some Chinese food. Hope you enjoyed your trip. See you next Wednesday, right here on the CC channel!
Keep em coming. Fun to see these pics.
Does he hang out at the Brown Jug because he drives a Pacer, or does he drive a Pacer because he hangs out at the Brown Jug?
PS: What’s Raviola?
PPS: Another sign of the times is that long TV antenna up on the tower behind the Brown Jug.
He hangs out at the Brown Jug because he drives a Pacer. And he loves ice cold PBR.
That guy could have been me 30 yrs. ago!
Anyone else think of Mr. Regular with that? “I’ve come to the BROWN JUG to meet the Pacer’s owner,,,BROOOOWN (realfart)”
All hail Fink!
So, you never said: what was it that your Dad did that called for file photos of a bunch of restaurants and bars?
Insurance, I believe.
He was a stick up man and a local muscle for hire that liked to plan ahead….
JK…..
He was a claims investigator for my grandfather’s insurance company in the ’70s. He probably visited some of the pictured locations at one time or another.
I like Carmine’s answer better.
I like the way you think, Mayor
PBR me ASAP!
I see a blue Mazda RX-4 in the right corner of the bottom picture(:D
Aaand an (oh dear Lord, please help us all to forget this someday) AMC Pacer in the bottom right corner of the top picture:D
I want that Pacer…
I’m hankering for a PBR…
I had completely forgotten about the gold and cream TBirds. Is there any other car that screams 1976 quite so loudly?
One of those “Bicentennial” Last of the Breed 1976 Eldorado convertibles with the red and blue pinstripes. I would drive one down the street dressed as Uncle Sam, but then people would think i was the Statue of Liberty’s pimp…..
Um, is there a CC Comment of the year award, this may be a contender, been chuckling to myself for 5 minutes here after reading it.
My grandparents had one of these Thunderbirds. It was ten years old when Grandpa brought it home, and was a little rusty. I remember sitting in it and taking note of the similarities between it and the Mark IV. I think they kept it for a little over ten years. It was a bit banged up and really rusty by then.
I could see how it was marketed as a car comparable to Rivieras and such in the day…it was nice.
If your school principal had a 1980 Phoenix that had “no problems” he must have had the only one ever made!
What is it with School Principals and their cars. Mine had a Morris Marina, yet another bastion of reliability, not.
Unusual as it may sound a mate and I searching for a dirt cheap runabout for his wife bought her a marina automatic coupe, From memory it was about $600 registered and driveable from a bombs and rockets dealer in Sydney they had that car five years that I know of and it never went wrong a true unicorn so it is possible the odd good one slipped out of the factory in any brand and model.
My thoughts as well!
This really takes me back to winters in Minnesota/Wisconsin, the thin film of road salt on cars and everything (and probably in the air too), the apartment on top of the bar with the fake stone/asphault shingle front, and usually the diagonal parking for the bar patrons as well because who can get out of a parallel spot at the end of the evening. Surprisingly I never knew anyone who lived above a bar.
Agreed… I keep expecting to see Walter Mathau and Jack Lemmon pushing old Burgess Meredith in a wheelchair in one of these street scenes
I did.((know someone))
I love it. These pictures just scream “Illinois Farm Country.” It always seemed as though almost every town in the middle of the state had a rail siding with a grain elevator, and a decaying downtown with the obligatory bar advertising Old Style.
Cookie cutter restaurants and having just got off the phone Im cruising a CH Mack tomorow delivering readymixed concrete to a McDonalds revamp, the shame.
A Pacer AND a Pabst’s Blue Ribbon sign in the first picture!!!!
Sweet Jesus I must be living right!
Hadn’t commented on the first batch of street scene pictures, so I gotta say that I do like seeing them. Even moreso than the usual curbsideclassics which I like, these seem to really do a good job of taking me back in time to “how things used to be.” As, perhaps with others on here, I was younger at the time and had a somewhat different perspective on things. Now, for me, each picture is almost a little time-capsule back in time. And, I am fond of small towns, moreso than big city life. Oh, and as for the AMC Pacer, I am able to admit that I actually liked them back in the day, and I still do.
I have to agree on the Pacer, it was a MUCH prettier car than the ugly Gremlin.
My ex Bro in Law and his wife, my oldest sister had a pea green ’72 with a 3 on the tree that they bought used in the early 80’s as a second car to go along with the ’74 Nova they had.
I got the Nova, they towed that Pacer to Florida behind their rental moving truck in 1983 so I think I got the better deal there. 🙂
Too bad the ‘ugly Gremlin’ was a better car than the Pacer!
Happy Motoring, Mark
Nice shots there Tom.
Loved these shots of middle America in the mid 80’s and seeing cars from then and earlier still being driven, and/or new to fairly new.
It’s shots like this that I love as it says so much about how things were and it’s history, something tend to gravitate towards.
A couple of years ago, saw an older women in a pristine Pontiac Phoenix trying to make a left turn and each time she’d get in the left turn lane, no street to turn into or it was closed while I drove home from work. This was in my neighborhood on the main drag, Broadway. the Phoenix was burgundy.
A better shot of the Pabst Blue Ribbon sign, please? I LOVE PBR, but being that I’m getting older than dirt, it’s Coors Silver Bullets for me, now :<⌠
It’s 2016 – I now drink Kraftig – a St. Louis beer I stock up on and have relatives bring me when they visit.
Good stuff.
I still like PBR, FWIW…
Grain Belt is my cheap beer of choice. Hamm’s is laughably mediocre, but at $13 for a 30-pack, I won’t say no to it either.
I’d imagine today’s Google street views will become very interesting as time goes by. Hopefully it’ll be available decades from now.
Funny you should mention that – right now, go to any old auto town like Flint or Detroit and do a Google street view. Pick any part of town. Notice the lack of foreign cars, and then notice that some of the American cars still being driven are 20 years old.
It’s eery (and great, all at the same time).
And I doubt that legacy street views will be kept publicly available. My neighborhood has been photographed multiple times already in the past several years.
This brings up an interesting subject. Up here in northern lower Michigan, Japanese cars are rather few and far between. It’s getting better, but where I live the nearest Japanese (and European) dealers are roughly seventy miles away. People do buy them, and occasionally they decide to trade them in for a domestic here in town. And almost always, the Japanese and/or Euro cars, regardless of how nice and well kept they are, will sit on the lots around here for months, usually until they are sent to auction.
It’s no secret that I own two Domestic cars, a Ford and a Buick, and I’m very happy with them both. However, if or when it comes time for a replacement, should a Japanese car came along that met my needs and was within my budget, I would not have a problem owning one again.
At least it wouldn’t be hard to find in the Walmart parking lot!
Of the 4 Japanese cars I have owned my favorite was my first, a 1969 Toyota Corolla 2 dr. The Honda Civic was the absolute pits and the 2 Mitsubishi’s were “EH”. Have never bought another Japanese car in the last 30 years. I got that out of my system years ago and never looked back.
Ah, Michigan, the last stand of the domestic car!
I’ve seen a FWD Pontiac Phoenix about a month ago that appeared to be in good shape, it appears to be a daily driver because I’ve seen it drive around town a few times, I remember seeing a lot of Colonnade style Cutlass Supreme’s well into the mid 90’s.
Aside from the understandable mid-western preference for Detroit Iron, while most ’70s Japanese cars were pretty durable mechanically, their bodies rusted rapidly, especially in places like Michigan.
I’ve heard the ‘golden age’ of Japanese cars was the mid ’90s.
Too bad some Japanese products haven’t had such a great rep lately, counting Toyota’s recent ‘accelerator-of-death’, and Takata’s ‘killer-shrapnel’ airbags.
Happy Motoring, Mark
Reminds me of any number of towns in Northern Ohio, in the seventies and eighties, including my own (Sandusky) with bar names like Country Tavern, Radio Inn, Kaman’s Bar, DJ’s Barn, you get the picture.
That first shot comparing the Pacer with the Chevy Impala/Caprice really brings it home how much glass the Pacer had and what a low beltline. It’s no wonder these AMCs had such a weight problem with their heavy glass, but I’ll bet the visibility was terrific!
I’m also liking the second pic comparing the Plymouth Valiant with the Chrysler LeBaron sedan. Two different interpretations of the box-on-wheels school of design.
It’s a ’78 Impala. The Pacer had excellent outward visibility, but still not as good as the exterior would have you believe. The A pillars, especially if your car had the optional vent windows, was fairly wide for its day, the B pillars were very thick, and most of the lower few inches of front door glass was concealed by a plastic molding. Only at the very front of the front side glass was unobscured, giving a view to that area similar to modern Ford trucks where the beltline juts down just aft of the A pillar. The D pillars in the hatchback weren’t all that thick, but were in odd places; backing up was somewhat impeded, but a rear passenger side view was more vastly open than any other car I’ve been in.
Can any legend identify the red car or truck behind the Pacer? I’m guessing S-10 Blazer or similar GMC, or a late GM RWD H body.
Thanks, Tom. These are very enjoyable. One of these days, I might just get me one of those Old Style signs.
My High School Principal drove a Land Cruiser… He was as cool as his ride.
Dennis, I hope you do get a Pacer someday. That would be slick.
A Pabst Blue Ribbon sign is like a campfire. It just draws you in.
After accidentally meeting Tom’s parents at work one day (Drain cleaning. They confused Mr Rooter with Roto Rooter) and seeing this? I miss him.
Oddly elderly Cars are still the norm between the QCA and Dubuque.
I miss Tom, too.
Interesting, to see that somewhat rare early 80s-era Toyota van among the domestic cars at the Rockford-area all day diner, in the final pic.
Let this music video recreate some of the ambience for you.
The Cougar in the third picture really brings back some memories. Back in ’84 my Wife and I were looking for our first new car. At first I wanted a ’79-85 Eldo but the used ones were too expensive for us, besides we wanted new, as we were frequently going to be driving back to the Bay Area from the L.A. area. I wanted a T Bird, my Wife wanted the Cougar, she loved the formal roof and wire caps. We ended up with an ’84 V6 Cougar. It was grey with a grey cloth interior. Very quiet and smooth and adequately powerful. It was very understated compared to the Eldo but was a nice car we kept until we bought our first minivan in 1990. It was also just the right size.