Welcome to Down On The Street, where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Today we're going to return to a couple of old friends.
Both the 1986 Toyota Corolla GT-S and 1979 Cadillac Fleetwood Limousine live in my neighborhood, so I've been forced to watch their respective downward spirals in recent months.
The Corolla parks on Alameda's main downtown thoroughfare, in a neighborhood packed with apartment buildings and businesses. Parking is San Francisco-grade maddening, especially when the street-sweeping parking tickets get dealt out, and tensions often run high. That means that the guy who owns this street-parked project AE86 is forced to play a game of automotive musical chairs with the car as he works on obtaining parts and fixing stuff… and the large quantity of cop-issued "move this car within 72 hours of git towed away" red-tag residue indicates that some of the locals are reporting the car as abandoned on a regular basis. It gets worse, though; after two years on the same block, it appears that enraged parking-space vigilantes have turned to vandalism to get their point across. It wouldn't bother me so much if we were dealing with just another Excel or Sable, but the GT-S is a genuine classic.
The story of this '79 Fleetwood limo is a little different. It's been anchored at the same spot for nearly a year now, and (since it's across the street from a mall and not in front of anyone's house) nobody seems to care. Could it have a trunk full of decomposing mob victims? Bales of banknotes? No doubt the reality is less romantic, but at least it's interesting to see a huge abandoned vehicle find a tow-truck-proof spot on Red Tag Island.