Goodnight, Pontiac

By now, you’ve all heard the news of Pontiac’s death sentence, made official earlier this week. We’ve seen plenty of tributes to the best and worst Pontiacs, and all sorts of dining-room-table historians come out of the woodwork to explain the marque’s downfall. Instead, we thought the most appropriate words to say weren’t words at all, but this December 1961 nighttime photograph of Paper City Motor Sales, a Pontiac-Cadillac dealership located in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

As noted in the Making of Modern Michigan caption for the photo, the building (at 411 West Kalamazoo Avenue) today remains, but the building no longer houses a dealership. It seems Paper City eventually became Jim Gilmore Pontiac-Cadillac. A daytime photo of Paper City is at the Portage District Library’s site.