If the notion of a luxury station wagon is as foreign to you as watching “over-the-air TV” or listening to the radio, well, kid, you didn't grow up in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s or 1980s. The 1990s to some extent, too. And please, get off my lawn.
A luxury wagon like this 1988 Mercury Colony Park was what you drove back then if you wanted to swaddle yourself and your family in the lap of luxury while allowing yourself to be as pragmatic as possible.
This one found me on Facebook Marketplace for sale here in the Cleveland, Ohio, area with an asking price of $4,800. The ad lists it as a Mercury Marquis. Technically, that's not quite right: by 1988, the full-size wagon was the Colony Park version of the Grand Marquis. From 1984 onward, the Colony Park was Mercury's sole full-size station wagon, complete with its obligatory simulated wood-grain siding.
With its wood sides—no one ever thought they were real anyway—a Mercury Colony Park was Mercury's top-line full-size station wagon from its introduction in 1957 through 1991. While a fraction of the number of Colony Parks were sold compared with the number of Ford Country Squires, if buyers wanted the equivalent of a station-wagon Lincoln—which Lincoln never built—a Mercury Colony Park was about as close as they were going to get.
A family truckster for the well-heeled that looked as relatively at home at the country club as it did at Home Depot.
I know I'm not the only car guy who's got a thing for station wagons, and the more luxurious and stuffed with doo-daddery, the better.
This one's got it all. Leather-trimmed seats, power windows and locks, air conditioning (I doubt it works), cruise control, tilt wheel and the apple of my 8- to 10-year-old eyes: twin, rear-facing fold-down, jump seats out back.
Leather seating surfaces were an available option on the 1988 Colony Park rather than standard equipment. They weren't cheap either, figure about $415. The original owner of this "are we there yet" mobile spared no expense.
By the end of the 1980s, station wagons as we knew them were circling the drain. The growing popularity of the minivan, followed by the rising popularity of SUVs, was eating into the traditional station wagon's territory. Ford's full-size station wagons disappeared after the 1991 model year, although Ford continued selling front-wheel-drive Taurus- and Mercury Sable-based wagons through 1995. GM continued to offer traditional full-size, body-on-frame, rear-wheel-drive wagons through 1996, when the Chevrolet Caprice and Buick Roadmaster wagons went away.
Chrysler got out of the station wagon business wagon after 1988.
Curiously, Cadillac sold a wagon version of its CTS for the 2010–2014 model years, ostensibly giving luxury buyers an alternative to the German wagons from BMW and Mercedes-Benz that were still being offered at the time. Hey, don't laugh; the CTS wagon was an amazing car but found few buyers.
Throw in the added surge in popularity of SUVs, and the station wagon, luxury or otherwise, was quickly becoming as irrelevant as VCRs and typewriters.
Our Marketplace gem here appears to have more than her fair share of problems. Rusted quarter panels mean there's probably more where that came from. The leather on the front seats is shot, and the door panels have been torn apart for an aftermarket stereo system, too.
Lastly but not leastly—and sadly—most of her simulated wood sides are faded and worn to the point that they only add to the dreariness of the whole package. Sorry, $4,800 seems like all the money in the world for this old luxury workhorse.
Perhaps it runs fine. Details in the ad, other than it “needs a windshield,” are scant.
It's fun to think about turning this into a sleeper of sorts. What massive junkyard truck engine and transmission could be stuffed into this thing to cost-effectively make it as fun as possible? Not before the interior gets sorted out first, though.
Today's do-everything-well crossovers and SUV's are not unlike our phones, which do most of the tasks we once needed separate appliances for well enough that we don't need those separate gadgets anymore. While some may lament the brand of the crossover or SUV they're driving, few, if any, complain about the vehicle itself per se—above and beyond its reliability or lack thereof.
That wasn't the case when this Colony Park's simulated—don't call it fake—wood siding was shiny and new. Back then, what type of vehicle you drove—sports car, pony car, personal luxury car, four-door sedan—said as much about you, whether you cared or not, as the logo on its hood and sides.
