Are the days of pole-mounted old cars numbered?

Posted on Sep 15, 2016 in Featured | 2 comments

Used to be – back in the days when distinctive vehicles could be had for cheap or free – if you wanted to really attract the eye of passersby to your place of business, you slathered some house paint on some old car, stuck it up on a pole, and became an instant local landmark. But those landmarks are slowly disappearing and it seems we may in our lifetimes see the end of the car-on-a-stick phenomenon.

While discussing the 1955 Cadillac Coupe de Ville that a couple of enterprising restorers had removed from a Texas rooftop last week, it seemed plenty of us knew of a car or truck hoisted up on high decades ago and used as a sign for a local business – sometimes for dining establishments, but more often for junkyards, car repair shops, and other auto-related companies. Regular reader Don Homuth shared the photo of the neon-outlined 1959 Cadillac Series 62 out front of a diner on Market Street in Salem, Oregon, while Scotty G pointed us toward the Porsche 914 advertising a salvage yard in Minneapolis just off I-94.

We’ve pointed out plenty of similar vehicles in the past – the Crosleyonnastick in Barrington, New Hampshire; the Renault Dauphine in Bowling Green, Kentucky; the pink Avenger kit car in Belleville, Ontario; another Crosleyonnastick in Mechanicville, Virginia; even more Crosleyonnasticks across the country; the Volkswagen Beetle atop Queen Connie in Brandon, Vermont; the Chevrolet DeLuxe Fleetline somewhere in Pennsylvania; the Model A speedster in British Columbia; the Crosleyonnaroof in Tacoma, Washington; the Hupmobile in Queens; and the homebuilt fiberglass car in Saginaw, Texas – and there’s a Flickr group dedicated to things stuck on top of poles that details several more, probably enough to start a custom Google Map to keep track of them all.

But as Speedzzter noted in the comments to the Coupe de Ville story, these cars on poles and cars on roofs seem to be an endangered species.

I miss old cars on top of buildings, pylons, and plinths. Modern sign regulations prohibit new installs in most locales. The few that still exist are mostly “grandfathered” in.

It’s more than just sign regulations, too. Development threatens many of the cars, such as the Mechanicville Crosleyonnastick, and the constant exposure to the elements will cause many to deteriorate to the point where they have to come down for safety’s sake. Meanwhile, plenty of the cars and trucks have become more highly sought after in the years they spent up high than when they were installed atop their poles and roofs – for example, the Coupe de Ville that started this conversation or the AMX/2 pushmobile concept car that once graced a pole in Ephrata, Pennsylvania (and, kind of along those lines, Paul Gorrell’s former Crosley sign turned scooter).

It becomes quickly apparent while perusing the photos of the cars still mounted on poles that most, if not all, of them have sat upon their perches for decades, which means that few, if any, business owners are relying on this old gimmick to bring in customers these days. Speedzzter wondered just what modern vehicles would be interesting enough to use for signs (“Who would want to see a minivan or an SUV atop a building or sign in 2040?” he asked), but we have to wonder what vehicles will ever be both distinctive enough and worthless enough to use for signs.

To be sure, some will evade the developer’s wrecking ball, and some will be more effort to restore than they’re worth, so they’ll remain in place for decades to come, maybe with a new coat of paint or a new string of holiday lights, but they’ll be the rare exceptions. More will come down, and with them will disappear a little bit more character and color from the American landscape.

That said, let us know about any others we might have missed, whether still up or taken down. Maybe we will put together a registry of sorts for them.