Lost Dealership Roundup: Packards, AMC, Dodge
On first glance, this photo we recently found over at Blog dos Carros Antigos seemed easy enough to investigate – we’ve had great success locating Packard dealerships on PackardInfo.com in the past, and D.E. McDaneld seems an uncommon-enough name. Easy-peasy, right? Except there is no listing for McDaneld on PackardInfo.com, and googling the name only turns up the fact that BdCA got the pic from the Online Archive of California, where it notes that the dealership was located on the corner of Hadley and Newlin in Whittier, California.
We only see one Whittier Packard dealership listed on PackardInfo.com, L. Albert Mencke, at 622 S. Greenleaf Avenue. That building looks like it’s still standing, with the sign possibly repurposed. The intersection of Hadley and Newlin doesn’t offer anything that looks like this building. As for Mr. McDaneld, in our research, we found only one other reference to him, as either the proprietor or manager of a Packard dealership at 1095 E. Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena (now home to a body shop, but it sure looks like an old Packard dealership). Which is also perplexing, because the only Colorado Boulevard Packard dealership we see in Pasadena on PackardInfo.com is the Bush-Morgan Motor Company at 1285 E. Colorado (I swear I’ve seen pics of that building before).
Here’s another one that slips through the gaps in PackardInfo.com’s database. Russ Philipp recently took a trip to Oklahoma and visited Oklahoma City’s Automobile Alley, where he spotted both this Packard dealership and the Hudson-Essex dealership beside it. It’s almost the same shot taken by 1980 Andrew on Flickr.
We know that it’s located at 811 Broadway, but the only OKC Packard dealership we see listed on PackardInfo.com is Packard Oklahoma Company at 231 Northwest Sixth. Packard Oklahoma certainly could have moved at some point in its existence, but in our research, we turned up another building alleged to have been a former Packard dealership in OKC, at the corner of Northwest 10th and Robinson, not too far away from either location.
To me, that Hudson-Essex building, two doors down on Broadway, is a more impressive building. Looking it up on HudsonJet.net’s Hudson dealership list reveals only this:
The Oklahoma City Hudson dealership still retains its previous glory as part of Automobile Alley, which is where the dealers along Broadway were. This area fell into disrepair during the ’60s through the ’80s, and missed the “urban renewal” carnage of the day. Ironically, it took the Murrah bombing in 1995 to generate interest in the area. The bombing took place just one block West of Automobile Alley, and the blast blew out nearly every window of the buildings along Broadway, including the Hudson building, the Packard, Studebaker, Buick, Cadillac, and other buildings. The OKC Memorial and the resulting cleaning-up of the area renewed interest in the historic district. Some of the dealerships are now loft apartments or businesses. The Hudson Building has an original Hudson dealer neon sign (nearly 10′ tall!) inside the lobby and visible from the street. It is now offices, but retains much of the ’40s and ’50s, especially.
Now, if you look at the aerial view of that row of buildings on Bing Maps, you’ll see a Chevrolet sign painted on the brickwork attached to the above-photographed building (also visible on Google Street View, around the corner on Seventh). Was the building a Chevrolet dealership at the same time that it was a Packard dealership? Before? After?
Okay, let’s leave the confusing Packard dealerships behind for now. Eddie Stakes sent over a pic of a license plate frame and business card he came across from Don-A-Vee Motors at 15737 S. Bellflower Boulevard in Bellflower, California. Don-A-Vee’s still around, selling Jeeps, but now in Placentia, California. The old address now seems to be a Billiards supply store.
Finally, an interesting photo from Hugo90 on the Hemmings Nation Flickr Pool of Braley’s Plymouth Dodge in Aberdeen, Washington, circa 1938. Hugo90 also obtained two more shots of the same location, in 1955 (when it operated as a Studebaker-Packard dealership – no, it’s not on PackardInfo.com either), and today, and from the last one, we can see that the building’s located at 110 W. Market Street. We see on the Havekost Nash dealership listings that Braley also had a Nash dealership in the 1930s, also located at 110 W. Market Street, and Hugo90 mentions that the location also housed an Edsel dealership (Huffman Motors, according to the Edsel Dealer Locator) after Studebaker-Packard. From old newspaper accounts, it seems Henry Braley had Dodge dealerships back to the mid-1920s and opened dealerships in Centralia and Chehalis as well.
