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Oakland

down on the street bonus edition

DOTS-O-Rama Sunday: 1956 Mercedes-Benz 180

We're escaping from behind the Orange Curtain- for the moment- and heading 430 miles north to Oakland. Oakland is just across the Estuary from Alameda, and it has nearly as many old vehicles per square mile as the Island That Time forgot; SuperCarnitas found this nice-looking Ponton not far from Oakland's Auto Row. Make the jump to see all the photos and read what SuperCarnitas has to say about his find.

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junkyard find

Hardtop Or No, This Galaxie Is Crusher Bound

Hyperocky's DOTS '67 Ford XL 2-door hardtop looks great, but we must remember that not all big Fords of its era are quite so nice these days. Plenty of beat-to-hell examples manage to clank along for decades before their date with The Crusher's jaws, as was the case with this extremely rough '66 I spotted at an East Bay wrecking yard last weekend. It appears that the dashboard and quite a few interior bits have been salvaged, so at least some of this Ford will live on in other cars.


down on the street bonus edition

Jeep FC170 Living Oaktown Style

Rickey Henderson, Earl Warren, Too $hort, and Gertrude Stein all came out of Oakland, and now it's the turn of this street-parked Jeep FC170 to put the East Bay's main city on the map yet again. If and when I run out of DOTS cars in Alameda, all I'll need to do is take a quick hop across the Estuary and start photographing Oakland vehicles; as you can see, they don't disappoint. Akier spotted this fine example of forward-control awesomeness in the Temescal district and was on this truck with his camera like Alice B. Toklas on a batch of hash brownies. Make the jump to read what Akier has to say about this find.

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down on the street bonus edition

Bay Area Train Commuters Prefer Vintage Iron

When you're having a quinto-Belvedere tailgate party at the Oakland Coliseum, you pay to park in the official stadium lot, but when you're swilling cheap beer and wolfing chile verde burritos prior to sneaking into the good seats with your bleacher tickets watching a ballgame from the bleachers, you don't want to pay to park your car. That's why me and my cheapskate friends park in the free Coliseum BART station parking lot for most games, where we often have the opportunity to admire vintage machinery driven by commuters. Some of you may remember the Menacing Bee Van from last year, and here we have a quintet of other interesting rides spotted in the same lot. Apologies for crappy phone-camera image quality.

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down on the street bonus edition

Camaro Dumped In Oakland Like An Unwanted Water Heater


Sandwiched between an asphalt plant and a huge yard used for storage of shipping containers from the nearby Port of Oakland, this road is a good shortcut to get to one of my favorite East Oakland junkyards. It's also a popular spot for illegal nighttime dumping, with heaps of dead refrigerators, concrete chunks, etc. often clogging the shoulders. Every so often you get a parts car that's been relieved of its worthwhile components and dumped here, and the latest such car is an '82 or '83 Z28 Camaro. There was a time when I'd have stopped and grabbed some parts myself (there's always something useful on such a car), but these days space restrictions force me to maintain a very selective parts hoard. Can you feel the Late Malaise spirit? Make the jump for an additional gallery.

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citroen

You Can Bring Your Crumpled Citroens To Hanzel's

With all this talk about Citröens around here, it's sad that I hardly ever get to see them in real life. That's why it was great to discover that there's a shop specializing in Citröen repair in downtown Oakland, just a few miles from Alameda. Commenter VWMiniSpeedster's great-grandfather opened the shop in 1918, and the family also owned a dealership selling Citröens, Panhards, Morgans, and Lloyds during the 1950s. Nowadays they still fix the old French machinery and have quite the collection on the premises. Make the jump for more photos, a description of the shop's history, and (for you wannabe 24 Hours of LeMons contestants) a chance to get a deal on a potential race car!

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retro

Forgotten Brand, Forgotten Car: 1929 Oakland All-American Six

Can you imagine a brand marketed above Pontiac and below Buick, Olds and Cadillac? Neither could GM after 1931, but before that Oakland was such a brand. Proving platform prostitution isn't a new idea, this 1929 Oakland All-American Six is basically a badge engineered Pontiac with a fancy interior. The story here isn't really the car though, it's the history. Somewhere around 1949, a mechanic parked this car in his garage, and it sat there ever since. Preserved even in the San Franciso climate, the Oakland is nearly perfect, right down to the velvet on the doors. Make your way over to telstarlogistics and ogle the incredibly clean flathead straight six, completely rustless doors and still intact emergency kit. What a find.

down on the street bonus edition

1964 Chrysler Newport


Since now I'm in the mood to look at mean-looking Detroit beaters, I'm breaking out some shots I took while enjoying a burritos-and-beer repast in the Oakland Coliseum BART parking lot prior to a baseball game. Apologies for the fuzztastic quality of my low-end cellphone camera, though I do think the grainy pixelated look does a good job of capturing the spirit of this fine automobile.
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fear my van's blood-dripping stinger

The Ultimate Van Decoration

While consuming a burritos-and-beer meal (served on the trunklid of the Crown Vic) in the Oakland Coliseum BART parking lot prior to watching yet another A's loss, I found my appetite disrupted by the sheer menace of the image painted on this yellow-and-black custom van. The sinister, knowing facial expression. The utter lack of limbs of any sort. The sunglasses.

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get the steward over here

Cush-Ride Suspension of Belief

Back when we lived Oakland work sometimes carried us over the Bay Bridge to Treasure Island to spray umber and ocher colored water about sets. Even though the island was only halfway across the bridge, getting there required paying the full bridge toll! While sitting in traffic the idea of a personal hovercraft was often entertained. The toll money saved could have then been spent on some goggles and foul weather gear, so that on rainy days we could make like the Gorton's Fisherman down Powell street on our way to the water. More »

coming straight from oakland

Proper Use of Scrapers


Back in early 21st century Oakland we started to see later eighties and early nineties Oldsmobile Cutlass Cieras, Chevrolet Celebs, Buick Park Aves, and even the occasional Pontiac 6000 rolling up and down San Pablo. At first they were mostly stock, but time brought Daytons and plenty of metalflake. We found out later these cars were collectively known as Scrapers. Although the whistle tip fad has come and gone the Scraper lives on, and has come to influence the kids. They're always coming out with something new in the O, and the Trunk Boiz got some hella hekka critical mass. More »

california uber alles

Arrrgh! $4+ Gas Spotted In California

I just took this shot at the gas station located at the corner of Ashby and Claremont in Berkeley... or maybe it's technically Oakland. No matter; the critical psychological barrier of Quadra-Buck Gas has been breached here. Yeah, yeah, nitpickers may have noted that it's Full Serve Premium, but we can expect Cat Piss 83 Octane, self-served by wringing gas-soaked rags over your fuel filler, to be up to Quadra-Buck standards any day now. More »

news

Hell Freezes Over! 580 Maze Fixed In 25 Days!

Here's a California joke for you:
Q: What's orange and sleeps eight?
A: A CalTrans truck! (CalTrans = California Dept. of Transportation)
Yes, the Golden State's highway bureaucracy is legendary for glacial slowness of freeway construction and/or repair, and we all laughed until oxygen deprivation set in when we heard the claim that the contractor fixing the melted 580 Maze would have it working in an absurd 25 days. 25 months, if we're lucky! Yet... it's done. We just hope they used the extra-heavy-duty zip-ties and real JB Weld (JB Qwik is not rated for freeway repair, folks). More »

bumpin' falcons

Ghetto Fabulous: Oaktown's Falcon Culture

Even with most of Oakland's customizers of vintage Detroit iron going with GM products- a trend with deep historical roots going back to the popularity of the '50 Chevy in old-school lowrider culture- there's a group of Oakland guys who've broken free of the GM trend and gone with the Ford Falcon. Daniel has hipped us to a fine documentary about the Falcons of Oakland; make the jump to his site to check out the trailer. More »

down on the street

Welcome to Oaktown: Mildly Donked Skylark

At the Oakland Coliseum BART station yesterday, we spied this '69 Buick Skylark sitting proudly by itself in the parking lot. Not so much a donk as a car heavily influenced by donkism (and Oakland, proud home of 2 $hort, is certainly on the leading edge of donkitude, what with the box Caprices teetering on absurd-diameter wheels you see towering over traffic around here), this Skylark actually looks halfway decent with the treatment... More »

retro

The Mighty Bay Bridge

There's a photograph of the bridge abutment between the two suspension spans of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in the liner notes of Jawbreaker's 24 Hour Revenge Therapy that I've always loved. Because while the Golden Gate may be the most perfectly beautiful bridge ever built, it's also kind of crap. First of all, it takes longer to get to Bottom of the Hill from the East Bay if you take the Golden Gate. But more seriously, the 10-foot lanes make driving over it an experience that can be rather nerve-wracking for the driver. The Bay, by contrast, is easy as pie. Other than the traffic. More »

news

Eastbound is Down: Bay Area Traffic Not as Bad as Expected Due to Bridge Deck Closing

For those of you who never did time in the Bay Area, we'll lay it straight out: when the Bay Bridge is closed, the normally bad traffic goes from indigestion to amoebic dysentery. And to demolish the old Western Approach to the hoary gray workhorse (and actually our favorite bridge anywhere (yes, we love you, too, Vincent Thomas, don't worry)), CalTrans has shut down the eastbound lower deck of the structure, causing traffic toward Oakland to either divert south on 101 to the San Mateo Bridge, or to cut through the City, head over the Golden Gate, up to San Rafael and over the Richmond Bridge. More »

news

Athletics Pitcher Esteban Loaiza's Ferrari Goes Faster Than His Pitches!


Only a pitcher for the Oakland Athletics could be picked up by the California highway patrol driving 120 mph in his Ferrari, fail a sobriety test and then be locked up in jail on suspicion of a DUI. Where we come from, we call that guilty of a DUI. But then again — we're from Detroit — we don't have a working bus system, much less a judicial system — what do we know? More »