It was the summer of 1977 when this literal New Yorker happened upon a new "New Yorker" for the first time. It was during my parents elongated search for a replacement for their long in the tooth 1968 Ford Ranch Wagon when I wandered into the new car showroom of the used car lot attached to Conway Motors, a Chrysler-Plymouth dealer, on Sunrise Highway in Baldwin, New York. I was transfixed by the sheer, massive bulk of the last of the great, American hard tops. It made the 1970 Buick Electra 225 they were looking at appear somewhat diminutive by comparison. As derivatively styled as it was, to me at least, it's what a luxury car should look like.
Puckish, impish 13 year old me knew that the behemoth in front of me was on borrowed time since I knew that trend setting GM had already downsized their full size cars for 1977. Despite the fact that GM's wares were still quite substantial in size, to me, the party was over. Thing is, I wasn't of driving age so I had no idea as to how hard these things were to maneuver. What's more, I wasn't the one who would be putting gas in the tank.
Given the tidy dimensions of today's automobiles it's hard to imagine how cars got this big in the first place. Furthermore, for homes with garages built before World War II, these cars wouldn't fit inside them. As far back as the late 1950's the automotive press and general public had been calling for smaller, more reasonably sized cars but The Big Three kept making them bigger and bigger. It's one of the reasons why mid sized cars in the 1960's took off the way that they did. And then, of course, they got disproportionately large too. I was small for my age and I was all but lost behind the wheel of that big brute all those years ago. The overly soft, cushy and slippery seats, as handsome as they were, did nothing to help my driving position either.
Eventually, I learned to drive in a car of similar size to this New Yorker I found in the parking lot of my office and I found it terrifying to drive. The distance from the steering wheel to the tip of that right front fender was so long that it felt it as though it belonged to another car. Same for the distance out the back to the rear of the car. The slop in the wheel doing nothing to make me feel as though I was driving as opposed to navigating a fairly large boat with a disconnected tiller.
I felt way more comfortable behind the wheel of a Plymouth Volare that was sitting right next to the New Yorker. I could see over the dash and the distance from the wheel to the edge of the hood wasn't so far away; I felt I could actually drive it. But I felt as though I was settling for something less - the Volare to me was a golf cart compared to the gigantic and prestigious New Yorker. Anyone could drive a golf cart - real men drove huge automobiles like the Chrysler New Yorker. Can't blame me for buying into the "bigger is better" mantra that was ram rodded into my parents brains seeing that's what had been hammered into them for years and years.
It was getting late and my father came into the showroom and told me that he and my mother had purchased the 1970 Buick Electra 225 from the dealership. I was thrilled. I loved that big brown bomb that I found in the back of the lot and felt it was far more suitable and conservative a purchase for our family than something as ostentatious as that New Yorker I was sitting in. I continued to futz with the knobs and buttons on the dash of the New Yorker as my father tapped me on the shoulder and said it was time to go.
My time in that Chrysler New Yorker had come to an end. Just like time was running out for the car itself.
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