Junkyard Find: 1964 Chrysler New Yorker
The last junked New Yorker we saw left something of a bad taste in my mouth, what with its not-very-luxurious Late Malaise Era overtones and general air of diminished expectations. Let’s all admire a real New Yorker, a car that looks classy even when propped on crude jackstands and awaiting consumption by The Crusher.
I spotted this battered-but-reasonably-complete ’64 at the same Denver self-service yard that gave us the ’82 New Yorker mentioned earlier. It has all the hallmarks of a car that sat for years or even decades before scrap steel prices caught up with it.
It’s got a pushbutton shifter, naturally.
And pushbutton HVAC controls as well! Making the fan lever mirror the shifter’s park-position lever is one of those design touches that was possible before nanny-state hand-wringers started worrying about getting their faces macerated by steel dash controls in low-speed wrecks.
The 1964 New Yorker came standard with a 340-horsepower 413-cubic-inch V8, which is a good thing; the four-door hardtop weighed 4,030 pounds.
This car doesn’t seem rusty, but all those years exposed to harsh Great Plains weather have just about obliterated the interior. It’s probably best that this car’s components live on in other, restorable New Yorkers (and Newports) while the shell becomes Chinese dishwasher components.
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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what junkyard in denver is this in? my sister lives there, and i need parts for mine!
Hi, I am in the denever area and just bought a 64 New Yorker, I need several parts off of that car, would you let me know what junyard it was at?