1966 Chrysler Newport, Harvard Square

Cars like this are an endangered species in Cambridge, especially during the winter months. Anytime. I was riding my bike up JFK Street between the swimming pool and my office when I saw this baby. Can't beat the Sixties for clean-sweeping design. And this one is especially clean because it's a minimalist Newport, bottom of the Chrysler lineup, not a gilded New Yorker or Imperial. Apologies for the dismal quality of the photos. It's not easy shooting a car parked on the street, especially when the scene is as busy with aggressive traffic as Harvard Square was today.

Fifty years later. Cars are more efficient and easier to drive; certainly a lot less fun to drive. But, man, are they ever dull. Down in Charlotte NC this past week, a very, very conservative bourgeois kinda banker-town: cars as dull as the houses. Everything grey or silver or white and some version of a snubby SUV. Never saw one machine worth shooting, except a Bentley in a....mall.

There' no doubt a more interesting and funkier side of Charlotte that I never saw: I was commuting between South Park, which felt designed by a 1980s  Mussolini ("More domes! More columns! Bigger!") and Myers Park, which is being consumed by its own unquenchable appetite for the "traditonal" trophy home. 

Ah, shut up. 

What about the Chrysler? Man, what a turnpike car! I like the color tuned to the Mass. plates.

My father, HHB, had a '68 Newport Custom. It annoyed me at the time because it came with dog-dish hubcaps. Which usually I'm fine with. But they just did not suit that car.

Found a New Yorker for sale in Washington State.

And a plain-jane 1967 Newport sedan on the block in Illinois.