Junkyard Find: 1989 Chrysler New Yorker Landau Mark Cross Edition
Ford really set the standard for designer-edition luxury cars during the late 1970s, with the Lincoln Mark V available with Superfly-grade styling by Bill Blass, Givenchy, Emilio Pucci, and Cartier. The competition scoured the world for competing designers, with even AMC getting into the act, and Chrysler signed up Mark Cross for some glitzed-up luxury cars based on stretched variants of the aging K Platform.
Here’s a 1989 Mark Cross Edition New Yorker Landau, spotted in a Denver self-service yard a couple of weeks ago.
Broughams and Landaus and Concourses and all the rest of that faux-luxe badging didn’t last long into the 1990s, at least not in the mainstream, but the word Landau still meant something to Chrysler shoppers in 1989.
Chrysler no longer used the “Corinthian Leather” term by this point, so the Mark Cross New Yorker (and Imperial) came with “Mark Cross leather with vinyl trim” inside. Sure, we mock this sort of interior today, but the setup was very comfy for a long drive across, say, Iowa and Nebraska.
Power came from the versatile Mitsubishi 6G72 V6, an engine that went into everything from the Mitsubishi Debonair to the worst car ever inflicted upon humanity.
The padded landau roof is in good shape by the standards of cars living under the withering Colorado sun. The resale value of these cars is so low today, though, that any mechanical problem costing more than a few hundred bucks amounts to a death sentence for most examples.
It was sold new in Denver and, 29 years later, will be crushed in Denver.
New Yorker gives you… everything!
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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When I was in high school I had a friend who blew the motor in his '76 Cougar and wound up with one very like this as a hand-me-down from his grandparents. He listened to Primus and Ministry and loathed the car's style but riding shotgun I thought it rode just fine. As a 16 year old, for some reason I was always impressed that they put the mouse fur on the A-pillar trim.
It has been 30 years!!!