Junkyard Find: 1977 Chrysler New Yorker Brougham Hardtop Sedan
Published: February 17th, 2020
Share
The New Yorker name goes way back for Chrysler, running from the 1940 model year all the way through a series of K-car- and Eagle Premier-based front-drivers in the 1980s and 1990s. To me, though, the greatest of the Chrysler New Yorkers were the ones built on the majestic C-Body unibody platform for the 1965 through 1978 model years, and I have the most affection for the “we don’t care about oil prices” cars of the Middle Malaise Era.Here’s a (nearly) two-and-a-half-ton ’77 Brougham hardtop sedan, which met its doom in a Denver self-service yard last fall.
All 1977 New Yorkers were Broughams, because 1977 was the most Broughamic of times. The standard New Yorker interior included crushed-velour bench seats, but the original purchaser of this fine machine paid extra for the pillow-top leather split bench option.
{
"id": "9171974",
"alt": "",
"title": "",
"video_link": "https://www.youtube.com/embed/5TGM4jafTrY",
"youtube_video_id": "5TGM4jafTrY"
}
{
"width": 634,
"height": 357,
"showRelated": true
}
My impossible-listening band of the late 1980s, Murilee Arraiac (yes, there’s a connection between the band name and my pen name) recorded several songs as homages to full-sized Chryslers. The best-known of those was Chrysler Imperial (a Mighty Pleasant Sound), which got some airplay on Japanese college radio in 1989, but we also recorded one entitled Chrysler Town & Country and one called Chrysler New Yorker. In honor of today’s Junkyard Find, I digitized the latter song from its cassette master and put it up on YouTube just yesterday. Enjoy.
Strangely, while this car came from the factory with a generous helping of luxury options, the audio “system” here is the cheap AM-only two-speaker radio. That still cost you $99 back then (about $437 in 2020 dollars), because this car didn’t come with any sort of radio as standard equipment. If you wanted the top-end AM/FM radio with 8-track — just the thing for listening to New Yorker-appropriate tunes — you’d have had to shell out a staggering $349 ($1,540 today) for it.
It does, however, have the Auto-Temp II HVAC option.
Because I’m a real gone cat, I had to buy this lovely chronometer for my car-clock collection. It makes some noise but still tells reasonably accurate time.
Power numbers from 1977 seem depressing today, and the 440-cubic-inch (7.2-liter) V8 in this car had a rating of just 195 horsepower to haul all 4,739 pounds of New Yorker steel. The torque figure for this engine was a respectable 320 lb-ft, however, so off-the-line acceleration was acceptable.
{
"id": "9171989",
"alt": "",
"title": "",
"video_link": "https://www.youtube.com/embed/U4xvhL9TMO0",
"youtube_video_id": "U4xvhL9TMO0"
}
{
"width": 634,
"height": 357,
"showRelated": true
}
Jack Jones sang it best:Gleaming luxury.All a car can be.And what’s also niceis that soft New Yorker price.
{
"id": "9171992",
"alt": "",
"title": "",
"video_link": "https://www.youtube.com/embed/OiX4No0X0xM",
"youtube_video_id": "OiX4No0X0xM"
}
{
"width": 634,
"height": 357,
"showRelated": true
}
Of course, the ’73 New Yorker was more or less the same thing as the Apollo Command Module, but expectations had diminished by 1977.You’ll find links to nearly 1,900 additional Junkyard Finds (including 55 Chryslers) at the Junkyard Home of the Murilee Martin Lifestyle Brand™.
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.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
Mr. Lahey, what happened to the roof of our car?
U could probably find one of these New Yorkers at Ralph Spoilsport Motors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHtPgfVgg0M