Lost Roadside Attraction: Before Cars and Coffee, There Was Zumbach's

Ralph Stein's The Great Cars, published in 1967, was almost as much a memoir of a life spent chasing classic cars as it was a depiction of the machines themselves.  Many of the cars he describes were encountered at Zumbach Motor Service in Manhattan. Zumbach's, as it was called by its fans, was more than a service and repair facility.  It was a kind of motoring shrine, and a meeting place where lovers of exotic machinery could meet to exchange technical information and racing lore. Seven decades or so before there was anything like "cars and coffee", there was Zumbach's.  In the decade preceding World War II, if you had an ailing Bugatti or Alfa Romeo or Duesenberg, and you were somewhere on the East Coast, you took it to Zumbach's.  By the early 1950s, Zumbach's fame had spread so far that actor Gary Cooper drove his Lagonda from Hollywood to New York once a year to the garage for tuning, and a collector from Michigan shipped his Talbot Lago there for expert attention.  Zumbach's built a famous racing car too...

This is Halley's Comet, a kind of early road racing hot rod based upon a modified Mercedes chassis for car collector McClure Halley.  The car was powered by an engine from the legendary Harry Miller, a high school dropout and intuitive engineer whose power plants ruled American tracks in the 1920s through  40s. Miller designed engines which inspired the Duesenberg brothers and also led to the Offenhauser engines which dominated the Indy 500 for decades.  In Halley's Comet, the engine is a Miller 151, a  twin-cam inline four with four valves per cylinder. The photo above, taken around 1935, shows Zumbach's team lined up behind their handiwork. The photo below shows the completed car as it competed at the Vanderbilt Cup Races in 1936. Today Halley's Comet is restored, and has hit the concours circuit...

Swiss mechanic Werner Maeder had joined Zumbach's in 1925, and took over the business in 1947 after the death of founder Charles Zumbach. Like Harry Miller, he was of the intuitive school of engineering and mechanics. In the photo below, he listens attentively to the idling straight eight of a Bugatti Type 57.

By summer of 1951, when the picture below was taken at Zumbach's for The Saturday Evening Post, phrases like "classic car" and "sports car" had begun to seep into American English.  GIs stationed in Britain had encountered small, nippy roadsters like MG's TC, and that car was credited after the war with making sports cars (and amateur road racing) affordable Stateside. Late in 1949 the Jaguar XK120* appeared, and by the early 50s it transformed American road racing as well as the U.S. market for imported cars, making performance previously attainable only in cars costing $12,000 (a fortune in 1950) available for the price of a Cadillac.  With its advanced twin overhead cam inline six and swoopy mix of modern and traditional lines, it formed a link to prewar classics like the Lagonda parked behind it, and the Bugatti lurking in the garage entry...

…and to cars like the Alfa Romeo 8C 2900 B, shown below with Maeder at the wheel and owner McClure Halley observing a road test in Central Park.  Today these cars would be welcome in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, but in 1951 some of them were serving double duty as weekend racers and grocery haulers.

While catering to wealthy collectors and racers, Maeder expanded the business to include maintenance and repair of everyday cars like Buicks, Hudsons and Studebakers, and advocated for careful and meticulous maintenance over the growing postwar trend of trading in cars every three years. When interviewed for the article in the Post, he was still driving the only car he'd ever bought new, a 1936 Buick.  In the photo below, he consults with the owner of a Singer*, another of the popular-priced British roadsters then entering the U.S. market, which would soon see Triumph TRs and Austin Healeys as well.

At the other end of the marketplace from Maeder's mainstream clientele, but just down the street (in fact, right next door), Luigi Chinetti would soon be seeking customers as the first U.S. distributor for something called the Ferrari. In 1951, not too many Americans knew about the car that Chinetti had piloted to victory in the 1949 Le Mans 24 Hours.  But the kind of people who cared about this achievement, and could possibly afford the eye-watering price tags on Chinetti's little red cars, were often the men and women who hung out at Zumbach's garage...

*Footnotes:  For more on the design and impact of the XK120, see "Game Changer" in these posts for 7/16/17. The Singer and its close relative, the HRG Twin Cam, are reviewed in the "Forgotten Classic" post for 3/28/18.

Photo Credits:

Top:  Zumbach Motor Service, photographer unknown

2nd:  vanderbiltcupraces.com

3rd thru 6th from top:  Hans Knopf for The Saturday Evening Post 

7th:  The Henry Ford collection