The automobile showrooms that lined Main Street may be among the hardest urban artifacts to save. They often don’t look special. Only their wide and tall windows, and telltale signs such as crankshaft or wheel emblems on the cornices, give away their past.
Yet the old showrooms are an important link to a time when motorists sported goggles to fight dust and were lucky if their vehicles didn’t get stuck in the mud on a Sunday outing.
While many cities have remnants of a commercial strip with original auto showrooms, few have taken the steps to preserve them.
“Some preservationists don’t feel that anything to do with the automobile is worthy of being kept–the motorcar is too new, too crass, too environmentally unfriendly,” says Kit Foster, membership secretary for the Society of Automotive Historians, based in Gales Ferry, Conn. “The automobile is the icon of our age. More than anything else, it shaped 20th Century America.”
Some cities could learn from Chicago, Washington, D.C., Boston, St. Louis and Pasadena, Calif., where preservationists have taken steps to save what’s left of Motor or Auto Row.
In Chicago, three among 55 Motor Row buildings were given landmark status by the Commission on Chicago Landmarks in 2001.
“From my perspective,” says auto historian David Kerr, “with so many buildings remaining, it would be a shame to lose them, because in all of the other cities in the U.S. nobody has anything like this.”
With its plain cream brick facade and run-down interior visible through a large display window, the Ford Motor Co. showroom at 1444 S. Michigan Ave. doesn’t look like a landmark. But legend has it that while Henry Ford was here in 1905 to oversee the construction of his first showroom outside of Detroit he took a break to watch meat being processed at the nearby stockyards and hit on the idea of the auto assembly line.
The Ford showroom was phenomenally successful, in part because of its proximity to the silk-stocking Prairie Avenue District and to the Loop, with its growing business base.
Michigan Avenue was also one of the best-paved roadways at the time, which made for a smoother test drive and an easier sale. Other automobile dealers flocked to the 16-block stretch of Michigan between 12th and 28th Streets, which became known as Motor Row.
A REO dealer sold the Speedwagon delivery truck. Another sold the Nyberg automobile, which was built in Indiana and at 2500 S. Michigan. Al Capone may have bought his wheels at the Cadillac dealership across the street from his office at the Metropole Hotel, in the 2300 block of South Michigan. Related auto businesses spilled onto Wabash and Indiana.
“It was just gigantic,” says Kerr. “If you wanted to buy a car this is where you went.” In searching the 1915-’16 Chicago telephone directory, Kerr counted 216 auto businesses in the Motor Row area.
In the 1920s the lights dimmed on Motor Row as the number of automakers dropped. Yet two big new showrooms were built in 1922–the Marmon at 2222 S. Michigan and Hudson at 2232 S. Michigan. Both were in an ornate Spanish-revival style, a sharp contrast to the simple Ford showroom.
The Michigan Avenue Motor Row is now confined to the area between Cermak Road and the Stevenson Expressway. The Cadillac dealership is gone. Ditto the Metropole Hotel, which was demolished in 1975 and is now the site of City Chevrolet. But the Ford, Marmon and Hudson showrooms are there. The Ford building, now empty, was most recently home to a caterer. The Marmon and the Hudson are being used for storage. The three received landmark status by the Commission on Chicago Landmarks in 2001.
St. Louis
Preservationists would like to do the same in St. Louis. This city was No. 2 in auto production behind Detroit in the early 20th Century, and one of the five most populous cities in the nation in 1904.
At that time, “everybody started doing something with autos,” says historian Gerald Perschbacher. At its height in the 1920s, 30 to 40 automotive-related businesses lined Locust Street in downtown St. Louis. It throbbed with residents looking to buy a Pierce-Arrow, Packard or Cadillac. By the 1950s, dealers were moving to South Kings Highway, where there was plentiful land to display autos outside.
But the old showrooms remain, many converted into microbreweries and storehouses. St. Louis vintage automobile collectors would like to put up brass plaques in the next two years to remind residents of the area’s past.
Boston
Boston has a historic stretch of auto showrooms on Commonwealth Avenue, but it’s not called auto row. It’s just the place where Bostonians bought their cars beginning in 1912. The one-mile strip remains, running parallel to the Charles River. Most are now owned by Boston University.
Hollinston, Mass., resident and SAH member Fred Roe can remember the strip’s heyday in the 1930s-’50s.
One Packard dealer hung his shingle outside an elaborate, five-story building filled with Oriental rugs and fine furnishings. Dealers would have open houses on Washington’s birthday, a holiday.
Residents, Roe among them, would ride the trolleys or walk down the street to gawk at the latest automobiles. He would visit the strip during that holiday weekend with a prep-school friend. “We visited the cars, picked up literature and compared notes,” he recalls. “We’d always end up at the Rolls-Royce dealer, a place for fancy cars. It would take several hours the way we did it.”
Pasadena, Calif.
Many showrooms remain on Millionaire’s Row, a stretch of shops on West Colorado Boulevard near Orange Grove Avenue, in Pasadena, Calif. During the row’s peak in the 1920s, millionaires would buy the latest Packard or Pierce-Arrow at any of the four or five Art Deco buildings.
The area remains tony, but instead of Pierce-Arrows, passersby will see Mercedes-Benzes and Jaguars in the windows. These buildings, with decorative ceramic tiles crafted by the renowned Ernest Batchelder Co., are part of the area’s historic district.
Washington, D.C.
Washington had a thriving auto row on 14 blocks of 14th Street from Thomas Circle to W Street. From the turn of the century through the 1960s, “this is where Washington went to buy its cars,” says historian Paul K. Williams of Kelsey & Associates in Washington. “There’s not much left to tell you that it was auto row. Only a trained eye can tell by seeing a telltale spoked tire or some other automobile decoration on the buildings.”
The area fell on hard times in the 1968 race riots, when some buildings were burned. What remained were boarded up. In the last 15 years, the area has been coming back to life. The Chevrolet dealer’s now a church; the DeSoto shop, an auto parts store. Restaurants and nightclubs thrive where auto dealers once stood. Many of these buildings are part of two historical districts.
Williams, who writes about the histories of houses in the Washington area, has enjoyed the area’s revival. “It’s been really fun to see,” he says. “It’s a good transformation.”
