Back Down On The Alameda Street: 1962 Lincoln Continental
Back in my Jalopnik days, I started the whole interesting-street-parked-car-photos thing with the original Down On The Street series. At that time, all the cars I shot were located in my old hometown on Alameda, California, and I got up to 600 or so before moving to Denver last summer. Now I’m back in Alameda, in preparation for my role working the 185-car Sears Pointless 24 Hours of LeMons race, and it wasn’t long before I spotted this fine machine parked near downtown.
It’s a very straight, mildly customized ’62 Continental, suicide doors and all, and it clearly gets regular street use.
Though a bit too slab-sided to look very graceful, the lines of this era of Continental have aged well.
The San Francisco Bay Area has been a car-club hotbed since, well, the dawn of the automobile. I’m not familiar with the Antioch Dragoons; the club could be 9 years old, or 90.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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"the lines of this era of Continental have aged well." The lines maybe, but there is a lot of early '60s awkward garishness in the front and rear treatments. Not up to the level of Chrysler shaved-dog's-ass ugliness, but this one is lurking around the corner.
Sorry, but there was nothing really beautiful about this car; it looks so ungainly.