Roadside Attraction: Carhenge----Stonehenge Rendered in Cars (Really)

Just under 4 miles north of the downtown center of Alliance, on Nebraska Route 87 (County Road 59) you will happen upon Carhenge.  And even if this place had another name, you'd probably think of Stonehenge right away.  None of this is a coincidence...

Jim Reinders used 39 cars to form his sculptural homage to his recently departed father and to the epic ruin on Salisbury Plain.  Family and friends helped out, and it took a team of nearly 3 dozen to complete the work, which opened in 1987.  The team painted all the cars in the same stoney shade of matte gray, a good move as it avoids the distractions of contrasting paint schemes and bright trim. It also focuses attention on form, something that's been lost at the earlier Cadillac Ranch in Texas, where graffiti and vandalism have blunted the impact of ten Fin Era Cadillacs buried nose down.  At Carhenge, you get to concentrate on mass, space and light...

For a comparison of the proportions and massing of Carhenge with the Sarcen Circle at Stonehenge, see the photo below.  The Sarcen Circle is a dozen feet larger in diameter than Carhenge, at 108 feet.  Seventeen of the original thirty upright "standing stones" remain after about 5,000 years of wear and tear...

As it turns out, choosing cars (at least, American cars) as his basic building block was another of the artist's good moves.  The vertical stones at Stonehenge are about 13 feet high and 7 feet wide.  To achieve the same height, Reinders buried "standard size" (that is, huge) cars of the Sixties up to 5 feet in the ground*.  Well, a '62 Buick Wildcat is 18 feet long; bury one 5 feet and you're left with 13 feet up to your horizontal "stone."  Perfect.  And Caddies, Chryslers and Lincolns of this era were around 80 inches wide, nearly the 7 feet of the standing stones.  Cars acting as beams span these verticals and are welded in place.  In the shot below, we see a Ford Fairlane of the '66-'67 period following a Chevelle from the same era, just as it did in so many suburban shopping center lots...

As with the original on the Salisbury Plain, some verticals are missing their horizontal attachments.  This enhances the overall ruin effect...

At Carhenge, cars play the roles of three trilithons within the circle, as well as heel stones, slaughter stone and two station stones.  We're nervous about that slaughter stone...

As a work of art, Carhenge resonates with all kinds of associations. One thinks of the transitory nature of material things, notices the welcome stillness after the highway's unending rush to somewhere (or nowhere), or maybe (if one is old enough) ponders how cool tail fins looked once when their bright metallic colors reflected the showroom lights...and how they seem kind of silly today. 

If you've spent a lot of time working under cars on a lift, you may be able to ID the supporting piers below.  As for the cars acting as lintels, we note an early 70s Ford Pinto leading a Fifties Willys Jeep pickup and an early 60s Plymouth Valiant...  

Below, a '55 Caddy dominates the foreground, with a Virgil Exner-designed 1960 Plymouth on the background pedestal, another of 3 trilithons within the circle.  Since the 1987 completion of Carhenge, the facility has opened an outdoor sculpture gallery called the Car Art Reserve.  A visitor center called the Pit Stop was added in 2007. Jim Reinders gifted the 10 acre Carhenge site to the Friends of Carhenge, who maintained it until 2013, when it was given to the City of Alliance.  It's open dawn to dusk.

Jim Reinders, who died in 2021, was born in Alliance in 1927, served in the U.S. Navy in the South Pacific during World War 2, and graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1948. His work as an engineer for the oil industry took him to England eventually, and that was apparently a high point of his travels, because he was drawn to those mysterious stones, placed long before the druids or the Celts arrived on the Salisbury Plain...

Reinders liked talking about his art, and when asked why he'd spent so much effort on Carhenge, answered "Why not?"  In the poster below, he sits happily in a mid-Seventies Chevy Vega wagon, a car which was not usually known to delight its drivers.  

Carhenge, however, has delighted thousands of human and canine visitors over the decades. Our friend Pablo visited on a windy day, and looked ready to take off with the breeze, unlike the thoroughly grounded '68 Caddy behind him.  Visitor information is available at carhenge.com, and the Visitor Center phone is 308-762-5400.

 

*Footnote:  Background information on the creation of Carhenge, along with details of other art installations and tourist amenities on the site, are available at carhenge.com.  

Roadside archeologists, and those interested in sculptural landmarks made of objects never intended for that purpose, may be interested in "Roadside Attraction: Little Man and Big Dog in Denver", posted here on May 14, 2016.  Little Man Ice Cream is housed in a 28-foot high metal cream can, and the 20-foot high Big Dog sculpture is covered with 90,000 dog tags.  Hound About Town Pablo is a fan of Little Man, but harbors some doubts about Big Dog...

Photo Credits

All color shots of Carhenge (and loyal hound Pablo) were generously provided by Veronika Sprinkel; these include the shot of the Jim Reinders poster.

The monochrome shot of Stonehenge is from wikimedia, while the monochrome photo of Jim Reinders at age 21 is from carhenge.com.