The Park Avenue was a short-lived, short-wheelbase Cadillac offered from 1961-63. At a time when a big car meant status, Cadillac did not exactly sell truckloads of them. But what if Cadillac had reintroduced the idea just in time for the 1973 fuel crisis?
The intent was that Cadillac owners in big cities might appreciate a short-deck version for easier parking and better maneuverability. Also, many homes at the time still had garages built in the 1920s and ’30s, and it was uncouth to have the last two feet of your Caddy sticking out the back. It may have been a good idea, but found few takers and it was discontinued after 1963.
I got the idea from Paul’s article on the 1961 Studebaker Lark, as excerpted below:
“I’ve had a long held fantasy since 1971, when GM’s mega-barges appeared: to take a cutting torch to a Caddy, and make a clean slice across the front and rear, just ahead of and behind the wheels…”
Well Paul, may I present the 1972 Park Avenue:
I wonder if it would have helped Cadillac to have a slightly smaller full-size during the 1973-74 gas crunch and subsequent recession in ’75. Cutting away an extra couple feet of sheetmetal had to have improved fuel economy too, even if only a little bit.
Here’s a stock 1973 Calais coupe…
…and the ’73 Park Avenue. Since the 1971-76 Cadillacs used the same body shell, they could have tooled it once, in 1971, and continued it for another five years without any additional cost.
While sales of the 1973s set a record, the ’74s came out just as the gas shortage started. How would a slightly reduced Caddy with maybe 2-4 more mpg have done?
The really big de Villes and Fleetwoods would still be there to truly live large, but you could have gotten a slightly smaller de Ville or Calais Park Avenue if you didn’t want a Noville Seville. The ’75-79 Seville had fine styling, but there were probably a number of traditional Cadillac owners who wouldn’t have ever considered it.
Could it have worked? Maybe not, as the 1961-63s were a sales disaster. But it’s an interesting idea nonetheless. What do you think?
Intriguing! It’s not exactly sliced clean just in front of and behind the front and rear wheels, but I’m kinda’ liking what you did to the ratty old ’72.
The shortened-wheelbase coupe and sedan are a bit more of a stretch ( I mean shrink) for me. Major wheel-house intrusion into the rear passenger compartment? But then that’s not exactly the point of the exercise, is it?
Give the battered ’72 a fastback roof-line, and it might be a foreshadowing of the current CTS Coupe.
Paul, who is this baby-faced lad who stole your avatar pic? 😉
My niece and her friend!
Tea time, how civilized!
Tea time is a daily ritual here (just finished ours). My SIL picked it up from our family.
Here, any time is tea time! With milk of course, like that which I detect in the cup in the young lady’s hand.
I was wrong when I said “daily”; twice daily is more like it, given that it’s the breakfast drink of choice in our household. And a third tea-time has been known to slip in too. And yes, always with whole milk!
I started it that way, but the proportions looked a little wonky, so I moved the rear wheel forward. Here’s the version with only the overhangs shortened.
That’s the way to go. Make the boot shorter still, and a pseudo fastback! The wheelbase needs to be emphasised.
+1
Okay, you asked for it! A fast back version on the stock wheelbase:
Nice; liking it.I’d drive that (if someone else was paying the gas bill).
Holy shit this is cool! Now for that Ecotec transplant, et voila! Excellent mileage. Best of all… its a Cadillac. 🙂
A Cadillac 928!
The spiritual predecessor to the CTS-V coupe. Maybe we need to make the 72 look even more like that? Lower the roof a bit….
OK, I gave it a try – The 1976 CTS Brougham.
Nooo. The gray fastback was much closer…
You’re right. The red one looks like a shooting brake, not a coupe. One more time…
Excellent. Now I really want it. You deserve a break now!
Oh shit. I just realised I actually *like* the CTS-V coupe design, considering how this is approaching it. Strange, I like a new car! Gotta upgrade the pockets though…
I think your original intuition was best, and that the rear wheel should be moved forward. I don’t like the look of any of the fastback iterations.
I don’t like the side profile of a CTS coupe either. Look at the huge expanse of flatness in the back fender. It makes the rear wheel look tiny, even though it has either 18″ or 19″ rims.
The 72 looks nice.
When the ’71 C bodies were being designed in late 60’s/1970, it was cheap gas, ‘bigger is better’, and no real chance of any ‘smaller’ DeVilles. The Seville meant to compete with Benzes, not a reaction to gas prices. ‘Ate up with Motor’ has good story of its gestation, which started before OPEC.
The OPEC Oil Embargo was a complete shock when it happened. GM didn’t decide to downsize full sized cars, until it occured. The 1977 designs were started fall ’73.
Reducing the deck on the green one makes the greenhouse look HUGE. That one I don’t really care for. However I think in the last picture it works.
Thanks for the laughs, Tom. 🙂 I hope people expand on this idea for April 1st.
The short ’74 looks pretty close to the actual proportions of the downsized ’77s.
The ’72 needs a smaller c-pillar I think. There’s a dynamic “sweep” to the relationship of the pillar and rear wheel that gets lost in the chop. On the short car the lines connecting the wheel well to the base of the pillar are almost vertical, bringing the flow of the sides to a halt.
“Also, many homes at the time still had garages built in the 1920s and ’30s, and it was uncouth to have the last two feet of your Caddy sticking out the back.”
Many homes still do! Not only is the Imp too long for my sad shack garage, but even if I let the tail hang out, I’d have to enter the car through the window.
A chopped Fuselage Chrysler would look ridiculous, as the sides of the car are quite tall. Caddies of this era were low enough to get away with it. Wonder if anyone has actually tried?
Well, how about a 1974 Cimarron?
I’ve seen worse!
The green Caddy reminds me of a character from the Pixar Cars movies.
I saw that Corvette-sized Imperial at a car show a few weeks ago. It’s quite an accomplishment. Judging from pics I saw beforehand, I thought I was going to hate it because they hacked-up a beautiful Imperial. Seeing it in person, I thought it was pretty cool and very well-done. I’m still not a fan of the wheels though.
I’ll have to take your word for it, BOC. There are just so few Imps, especially convertibles. What’s next, a fenderless Duesenberg hi-boy with a 350/350? 😉
I like a tastefully done custom, and this car definitely kept true to the original Imperial styling. No convertibles were sacrificed either; this started out as a 4-door hardtop. Of course, considering how much of the original car wound-up in the scrap pile, maybe they should’ve just taken moulds from the original body and done their car in fiberglass.
Here’s a fenderless Duesenberg for you:
http://www.conceptcarz.com/vehicle/z15198/Duesenberg-Cummins-Diesel-Indy-Racer.aspx
Thankfully, not a SBC under the hood. 🙂
Cadillac’s answer to the MB 450SLC?
When I was a kid, I used to draw cars like these – small versions of Caddies, etc. I think i drew (or attempted to draw) that exact car! Still have them….my kids are always impressed!
It turned out to be cheaper to build a little doghouse extension out of the back side of the garage. I lived in a house built in the 20s that had a little roofed extension jutting out from the garage. When I owned a 66 Fury III with a tall fixed hood ornament, I had to back the car in because the hood ornament was too tall to go under the extension.
The reason the Park Avenue didn’t sell well was the Lincoln Continental did it (Compact Luxury) better. Cadillac did BIG Luxury better though.
A shorter fastback Caddy could have been a sports/luxury executive coupe like the Marauder X-100, with bucket seats and a console.
Interesting idea. Just don’t think it was the right time fo smaller Cads yet.
I believe the Park Avenue’s wheelbase was not shortened, just the rear deck. Saw a ’63 parked on an NYC street not long ago and I liked the proportions. It made the extra size on the standard Cadillacs look superfluous. Of course, in historical hindsight it actually was, but it’s always important to look at things in the context of the time.
Sales records such as the one set in 1973 were seen as a good thing. In those “move the iron” days, preserving the brand was less of a priority. If you could sell a million Chevys and half a million Caddies by sprucing up one and decontenting the other, who was going to argue?
When the full-size cars were downsized in 1977, the general attitude was that people were making a sacrifice compared to the previous models, though it was also mentioned that the ’77’s were actually about the same size as 1961 cars. Their clear superiority to their predecessors in just about every way imaginable made people forget the old barges very quickly.
This is certainly better proportioned than the original attempt, and not a bad shape if you like such things.
There might have been a market for this, but not because of the OPEC embargo. Cadillac did a marketing study around 1971 and found a lot of buyers, particularly older women, complaining (once again) that the big cars were cumbersome to park. Now, whether those buyers would have actually put their money where their mouths were is another matter, but people had been asking for it. That was the original impetus for the ’76 Seville.
“It made the extra size on the standard Cadillacs look superfluous. Of course, in historical hindsight it actually was, but it’s always important to look at things in the context of the time.”
Yes – at odds with the whole bigger is better push. They could have done something like “more room, less space”.
A similar theme to the Cadillac “if you own one, you’ll have the space for it” theory I’ve seen more recently is the Mercedes E-class convertible. I heard that they said making a folding hardtop wasn’t a high priority because most people who own those cars garage them, whereas a much larger proportion of SLK/CLKs live outside, eg in neighbourhoods like the one I was in on the weekend – $1m+ 19th century terrace houses with almost zero off-street parking.
I think Tom’s cars need a slightly shorter hood to balance the proportions – the distance behind the wheels as well as ahead of them. Am I correct in thinking it would be fairly easy to put a Cadillac body on something like a Buick frame to make a shorter wheelbase version (shorter hood) along with the reduced rear overhang? In other words, with a bit of mix and match and a couple of new outer sheetmetal pieces such a car could be built without too much investment.
I posted this link a few weeks back on another entry, but it is even more apropo in connection with this story.
http://www.hymanltd.com/search/Details.asp?stockno=4584&recordCount=32
This Continental must look absolutely cartoonish from the side. I thought at first that Hyman Ltd. avoided full profile shots of it to minimize the horror, but, in fact, they don’t include profile photos on any of their cars.
But the best part of this is that it’s not a photo-chop. It’s for real, folks. And it’s by Derham, no less. So who’s going to step up to the plate and put this in your too-short garage for $68,500?
(Actually, Hyman Ltd. always has many beautiful and interesting vehicles on its site. Definitely worth a visit.)
They don’t specifically say, but it sounds like they built the two cars on speculation – not surprising that nobody took them up!
As noted in msquare’s comment, the Park Avenue was not a short-wheelbase sedan; it was a short-deck sedan. Which Cadillac had offered through most of the Fifties as the Series 62 Sedan, although it was not marketed as such, having been for many years the standard-length Cadillac until it was superseded by such long-deck variants as the Sixty Special, Coupe deVille and Sedan deVille (which in its first year, 1956, was offered only with the long deck, but went back to the short deck in 1957, and was available in both short and long (“extended-deck”) versions for 1958 before Cadillac settled on the extended deck for all of its cars starting in 1959. So the 1962-63 “short-deck” cars were basically a reversion to the model lineup as it had existed in the Fifties.