Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Salt Lake City, Utah.
Randolph St., Chicago, IL.
Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA.
St. Petersburg, Florida.
Union Station, Washington DC.
Durham, North Carolina.
Market St., San Francisco, CA.
Times Square, New York City.
Seattle, Washington State.
Nice homemade two-tone on the ’57 Plymouth.
Is that a cab? The newer Plymouth in the background has the same color scheme.
I’ll take the Ford Falcon wagon from Union Station, Washington DC, and the Chevy El Camino from Seattle, WA.
This is a nice selection—and I was able to identify a couple before peeking at their captions.
The cars always help to (approximately) date these photos, and then there’s more info to pin things down: the movies being shown, the billboard campaigns, even what looks to be a Salvation Army kettle in St. Petersburg. When today’s errands are done perhaps I’ll try sleuthing a couple!
Union Station (DC): custom paint job on the Chrysler-corp. car at left?
The multi-colored cars in the Washington, DC shot (there’s another one in the background) are taxis from Diamond Cab. They used that color scheme until just a few years ago when Washington’s city government began requiring a uniform (red & silver) cab design.
Here’s a relatively recent picture of Diamond Cab found on Flickr:
“Union Station” is back to looking pretty sad again, these days.
Oh, and regarding billboards, my favorite here is the elaborate mayonnaise billboard in the Los Angeles shot. We don’t see many billboards for condiments any longer – or maybe they’re still around but I just ignore them…
don’t see billboards in “urban settings” anymore.
On State Street, they don’t do things like LA! That’s no bull, Durham, but I Willsure love to beat my feet on Market Street in San Francisco, where many years ago, I left my heart and saw many beautiful vintage automobiles including a 59 Pink Cadillac.
In many towns a cities, like mine billboards and regulated in size and height and locations. Another sad story 😞
You’d actually prefer to have larger than life images trying to sell you Lincoln SUVs, cigarettes, and mayonnaise in your face all the time?
Did they invent trees in the 1980s or was it the 1990s? It seems that in cities today there are far more trees almost everywhere than in most of these pictures, which really do give off a “concrete jungle” vibe in many cases and not really what I recall from visits to many of these locations in the last couple of decades.
San Francisco shot looks to be taken from between 4th Street and 5th Street looking east towards the Ferry Building at the very end and the Emporium would be off to the right out of the picture closer to Fifth. Very different now since BART went in. The BART tunnel started up Market St. in 1969ish. This shot June 1970.
Today
It took a minute to sink in, but I realized I’d seen the movie “Call Me Bwana” advertised on the marquee in the Chicago photo. With Bob Hope. Probably on daytime TV ten years after it was in the theaters.
Times Square, New York City:
Definitely 1964 based on the three movies listed on the bill boards. As for “A Hard Day’s Night”, my older sisters were very BIG Beatle fans and got to see them at Tad Gormley Stadium in New Orleans. One of my sisters still has the ticket stub.
A bit more about Times Square, here a screenshot then I saw on IMCDB from the movie titled “Le Gendarme à New York”. https://imcdb.org/vehicle_1583249-Opel-Kadett-Caravan-1964.html
Speaking of that movie, here a part where Les Gendarmes do a visit of Manhattan.
Nice – I think this is the first time we’ve had a Pullman trolley bus pic on CC….Seattle bought quite a few.
Good reminder it’s time for a post.
Wonderful pictures, they take me back to the ‘Concrete Jungle’, the horns and bus noises echoing off the tall buildings .
Enjoyed the French Gendarmes clip to, a well practiced group of actors there .
-Nate
I saw an old photo of a billboard across from our old house I grew up in. It was either a model T or Model A advertised for $795.
Notable cars and colors:
St. Petersburg, FL: ’59 Chevrolet Bel Air in Highland Green (the darker of the two greens offered that year.) Two-toned with white–an excellent combination!
Durham, NC: A ’61 Mercury Meteor 800 in solid Sheffield Gray, which is kind of silvery. All the big Mercurys from 1957 through 61 or 62 have a really low survival rate.
Washington, DC: It seems so many of the 1961 Chrysler Newports were painted solid white like this one.
This is phenomenal! Keep ‘em coming, these vintage Americana photos. Brings back memories of my childhood!
Don’t recognize any buildings in downtown Sioux Falls, S.D. picture- what road is this picture taken from?
It’s on N. Phillips Ave. looking south between 8th & 10th Sts. The Cataract Hotel (visible in the picture) was located on the northwest corner of 9th & Phillips. None of those buildings are standing any longer.
My grandfather’s Plymouth Desoto dealership was on 129 S. Dakota Avenue in Sioux Falls
Can you believe how BLUE the sky was in the LA photo?
The first 2 pics feature a 1953 Pontiac, one coming toward us, the second going away. Light green with forest green tops.
I owned one. Wish I still had it! Great car!