Roadside Attraction: Clifton's Cabinet of Curiosities

Clifton's was a project initiated in 1931 by an eccentric millionaire named Clifford Clinton (Clifton was a contraction of those names) and eventually became a chain of 8 cafeteria-style restaurants, each with its own theme, serving Californians during the darkest days of the Great Depression. The second facility, known as Clifton's Brookdale but now renamed Clifton's Cabinet of Curiosities, opened in 1935.  That construction interval says something about the scope of the project. Clifton's occupied 5 floors of a new building, and was designed as a destination restaurant.  It was also the largest cafeteria-style restaurant on the planet.  But unlike today's destination restaurants, Clifton's had no fixed prices, just a policy of letting clients pay what they could afford.  It shared this philosophy with the other restaurants in the Clifton's chain, which featured neon signs urging customers to "Pay What You Wish"; no one seeking a meal was turned away.  At the height of the Brookdale Clifton's 75-year run, it served 15,000 customers a day.  But surprisingly, this mission did not result in austere, Soviet-style architecture.  Clifton's was a predictor of both Disneyland and Las Vegas.  Among the restored features you'll find inside are murals of wild and scenic California, nature dioramas, stuffed wildlife including a lion, plaster of Paris mountains, a faux redwood tree four stories tall, a bar counter impacted by a bronze meteorite, and a floor with fossilized dinosaur eggs.  Viewed against the current vogue for spare, clean-lined Mid-Century Modern, Clifton's may seem like over-the-top kitsch, but let's remember that when it opened, average families could not afford travel, and many considered themselves lucky to afford food.  Fully 80% of home mortgages were under water during the Great Depression's deepest abyss.  Clifton's Brookdale kept its doors open for 75 years, closing in 2010, by which time it was serving around 2,000 Los Angelenos a day.  It was the last surviving link in the Clifton's chain...

Clifton's was purchased in 2010 by developer Andrew Meieran, someone with large ambitions and deep enough pockets to fund a 5-year restoration (that's right; it took 2 years longer to restore than it took to build) and the restaurant occupies four floors of the building, as it did in its heyday.  Some serving areas, including the bakery, were open during the long renovation process.  The new chef, Jason Fullilove (you cannot make this stuff up), a graduate of a trendy haute cuisine outfit in Malibu, found a file with original recipes, and has revived some of them, including the famous Clifton's Jello.  The "pay only what you can" policy is gone, but one policy which has been made a permanent fixture is the requirement to choose 10% of all hires from graduates of local shelters for survivors of abuse and homelessness.  And there have been a lot of hires; Clifton's 5th floor kitchen occupies ten thousand square feet and employs 50 cooks.

Photo credits:

Top:   thirstyinla.com

2nd:   ladowntownnews.com

3rd:    lamag.com

Bottom:  urbandaddy.com

Lines of Influence Part 2: Avanti Antecedents

As outlined in yesterday's post, a crack team of industrial designers managed to get a new car from clay model to drivable test cars for the NYC Auto Show in a year.  This effort is even more remarkable when considering the coordination required to acquire tooling, fabricate molds for fiberglass bodies, and line up suppliers for the myriad components that go into a car.  What Studebaker had as a starting point was a sturdy and reliable V8 which could form the basis of a performance car.  And what Raymond Loewy had was a collection of notions about where car design might be headed, notions he had explored in two previous concept cars which he'd also used as daily drivers to evaluate ideas.  Some of these ideas appeared in the first sketches produced by the sequestered Palm Springs design team in 1961.  The first obvious source of ideas was a special BMW 507 coupe bodied to Loewy's design by tiny French coach builder Pichon et Parat in 1957.

Cars did not look like this in 1957.  Among the ideas which appeared 5 years later on the Avanti are the bumper which surmounts a simple, curved air intake and the asymmetrical raised portion of the hood which houses the logo (in the case the blue and white BMW roundel).  The oblong headlight units were prototypes made available by Sylvania and were not approved for use on US highways; on the 1964 version of the Avanti (roughly the last 800 cars built) and on the later Avanti II a similar effect was achieved by placing an oblong frame with glass covers over conventional round headlight units.  Here the arc of the fenders over the front wheels flows down and over the bumper / grille assembly, providing continuity of form.   This car might have been a bit happier with concealed headlights, especially as these units were illegal anyway...

In both views of this car, it's easy to see the genesis of the horizontal crease linking the front and rear wheelhouses.  On this BMW, however, it arcs over the rear wheels and wraps around the tail, linking the curved wheel arches to the echoing wrap of the rear window.  As on the Avanti, the body wraps tightly around the wheels, and the wheel openings are not concentric with the wheels. But here the thrust of the openings is forward rather than rearward.  Two features clearly visible here did not make it onto the Avanti.  One is the pronounced wrap of the door openings into the roof, designed to ease entry into the low cockpit.  The wrap-over doors did appear, however, on the Corvette Sting Ray coupe for 1963.  The other is the sharp ridge formed at the junction of the upper and lower rear fender surfaces.  Richard Teague employed this sine wave / ridge combo on the early 70s AMX3 show cars for American Motors.  In its uninhibited curvilinear exuberance, Loewy's futurist design also looks backward, to the teardrop coupes designed for Talbot Lago chassis by Joseph Figoni in the late 1930s.  Raymond Loewy was very much aware of those cars…

In 1959 Loewy commissioned Motto of Turin to build his design for an aerodynamic coupe on a Lancia Flaminia chassis.  At least in its rear three-quarter view, it provided more links to the themes that were used in the Avanti.  Note the clean, tapered tail with short overhangs, blade-like bumper, horizontal tail lights and generously curved window.  The boundary layer airfoil above that window was an advanced feature, and only appeared on production cars much later. In this view, the Lancia Loraymo is a more restrained design than the BMW.  

From the front, an early attempt at energy-absorbing bumper grille unit with outrigger lights spoiled the effect...

Loewy, who never hesitated to experiment with new ideas, was equally ready to discard ineffective ones, and somehow never let go of a good idea.  It was this persistence in pursuit of lightness, safety and efficiency which was echoed in the title of his book, "Never Leave Well Enough Alone", and which led to consulting work for NASA as well as work on Air Force One.  It also seems to have infused the thinking behind Studebaker's last new production design, one which outlasted the company by a quarter century.

Photo credits:
BMW coupe and Lancia Loraymo:  Raymond Loewy Associates
1938 Talbot Lago teardrop coupe:  Stylepinner.com
Studebaker Avanti:  Studebaker Corporation

Lines of Influence: The Avanti and How It Grew

An architect friend who's about 15 years my junior recently saw a car like one pictured below on a street here in Boulder and e-mailed, asking "What's an Avanti?"  A good question.  In the spring of 1962, when pre-production prototypes were shown to the press, it seemed like a fresh new idea, a break with the over-chromed, bloated and finned barges common up until right about then.  To industry insiders, it was a last-ditch effort to save Studebaker, initiated by company president Sherwood Egbert and designed by Raymond Loewy's team in secret at a secluded studio in Palm Springs.  That's Loewy in the foreground, with Egbert sitting on the car.  The Avanti project went from approval of the clay model in April 1961 to display of the first cars at the New York Auto Show exactly one year later, with the first production cars rolling off the line in June 1962.  Despite the insane schedule, the team managed to hang onto the goals from the original program.  These included the first caliper disc brakes on an American production car*, the first integrated rollover protection, and engine options which included supercharging.  Perhaps the car still looks fresh because it's so close to the "first impression" sketches; nobody had time to argue about stuff.

To those who were not car-crazy high school or middle school kids in 1963, the Avanti only seems vaguely familiar because of the many cars it influenced.  Some features showed up fairly soon, such as the "Coke bottle" shape of the body in plan view, with a subtle indent between front and rear fenders, with the wheel arches linked by a sharp horizontal crease front to rear.  These items showed up in 1967 on the Camaro and Firebird twins, GM's belated answer to Ford's Mustang. Those cars also echoed the Avanti's shallow, blade-like bumpers, semi-fastback roofline and upswept, tapered tail with short rear overhangs.

In a way, the 1967 Camaro was a Mustang in an Avanti suit; it had the proportions and massing of the Ford, but the handling of form and surface development was much more like the Studebaker. This is especially visible in a comparison of side elevations below. Note that the wheel arches on the Avanti are not concentric with the circles of the wheels; they are rearward-slanting half ovals, leading the eye forward and imparting a sense of movement to the whole composition. They also emphasize the car's "California rake", a nose-down, tail-up attitude inherited from hot rodders.  On the Avanti, there's no grille, just a simple air intake below the bumper, while the Camaro has a conventional oblong grille linking the headlights.  The Avanti's asymmetrical hood bulge forms the instrument binnacle when it crosses the plane of the windshield.  It, like the blade shapes formed into the tops of the fenders, was intended as an aid in aiming the car.  Those blade shapes were suggested by Loewy after he saw a preview of the 1961 Lincoln Continental (see "When the Sixties Really Began" in the archive for 11/18/15).  This is almost comical, as the Lincoln is a composition of straight, parallel lines, and the only straight lines anywhere on the Avanti frame the backup lights...

In their design for the Camaro, GM's design staff produced a sort of smooth jazz version of the Avanti, erasing most of the cool, hipster eccentricities that were a product of the Loewy team's improvisation under pressure.  Some people will prefer the Camaro to the Avanti, but their view is just a reminder of why Kenny G was able to sell more records than, say, John Coltrane.  By the time that '67 Camaro appeared, Studebaker had stopped producing cars, but production of the Avanti had been resumed in 1965 by the Altman brothers, ex-Packard dealers.  Ironically, their version featured a Chevy engine…Production continued into the 1980s, and the Porsche design team credited the Avanti with influencing their 924 and 944.

*Footnote:  Or at least, the first caliper disc brakes that stayed in production during the life of the car.  Chrysler had offered disc brakes on the Town and Country in 1950, but they weren't caliper discs, and Crosley had offered true caliper discs in 1949-50, but went back to drums for the 1951 model year owing to corrosion and maintenance problems with their discs.

Photo credits:

Top and 3rd from top:  Studebaker Corporation

2nd:  car-from-uk.com

Bottom:  blacktopcandys.com

The Etceterini Files, Part 4: Innocenti 186 GT

Innocenti, a firm known mainly for assembling a variety of British Motor Company products in Italy, might be passed over for consideration as a bona fide etceterini maker, were it not for the 186 GT. The company was founded in the 1920s and by the early 1970s achieved the second highest sales figures in Italy with its locally-assembled variations on English favorites including the BMC Mini and, from 1961 through 1970, a Ghia-styled version of the Austin-Healey Sprite. Bodied by OSI, a Ghia affiliate, it featured roll-up windows before the Sprite acquired this feature, and was also available in coupe form, unlike the Sprite or MG Midget.  The Spider shares the Sprite's 80 inch wheelbase, while the rarer coupe, introduced in 1966, has an 86 inch wheelbase and a roomier cabin…

Mechanical improvements paced the Sprite and Midget during the production run, so the 948cc engine in the original cars was replaced by a 1098 in 1968, and superseded by the 1275 in 1970. But while these cars achieved a bit of success by offering more comfort and style than the Sprite, their temperament was never quite Italian enough for some fans.  That wouldn't have been a complaint if their sister car, the prototype 186 GT, had achieved production.

Like the ASA 1000 featured in our previous essay, the 186 GT was styled by Giorgetto Giugiaro at Bertone.  Unlike that car, it has some affinity to the Iso Rivolta notchback coupe he designed around the same time, especially in the treatment of the grille, the horizontal character line running across the door and around the rear wheel arches, and the tidy curve of the tail. Apparently only two prototypes were built in 1963, and these differed in details like the rear wheel arch molding, side marker lights and wheels*.  

But it was under the hood that the 186 revealed its true intent.  To go with the enhanced rigidity of a new tubular chassis, the Innocenti crew specified a unique adaptation of the early 60 degree Dino Ferrari engine, here in 1,788 cc, 156 hp form and looking for all the world like half a Colombo V12, which it basically was.  To my knowledge, this car is the only place where the 1.8 liter version of this early Dino V6 appeared, though Ferrari had raced a 196S in 1962.  That engine was also a 60 degree, sohc design. 

The 186 GT can be understood, like the ASA before it, as another attempt by Ferrari to generate revenue by getting one of their engine designs into larger scale production. Unlike the ASA, it had the backing of a larger industrial concern with much bigger production facilities.  But it was doomed by a recession that blunted the demand for these kinds of cars. Ferrari would need to wait for the design of a new 65 degree V6, and for an agreement with Fiat, to get that car on the road.

*Footnotes added 5-7-19: The 186GT  prototypes featured 4-wheel disc brakes and 4 speed transmissions with overdrive, and the first car shown above with Borrani wire wheels was built with a tubular frame. The 2nd car, a production prototype shown here with disc wheels, was engineered by Innocenti with unit body construction. The production prototype was destroyed, but the earlier car was discovered by historian Ermanno Cozza in an Innocenti building when the company was taken over by Fiat in 1994.  It appeared in an exhibit at the Museo Ferrari in 2015, the year before this post originally appeared.

Photo credits:

Top:  Innocenti 950 Spider  /  wikimedia

2nd:  Innocenti Coupe 'C'  /  bringatrailer.com

Remainder:  Innocenti 186 GT / modelfoxbrianza.it

The Etceterini Files Part 3: ASA, the Ferrarina

The term "etceterini" usually refers to small, often Fiat-based, sports and race cars built in Italy in the first quarter century or so after WWII.  Etceterini were so named because they were not from any of Italy's fabled suppliers of fleet machines, such as Alfa Romeo, Lancia, or Maserati.  And they were certainly not from the one postwar upstart which had already achieved universal fame by the early 50s:  Ferrari.  But I'd argue that one almost-forgotten car straddles the categories of etceterini and Ferrari:  the ASA.

While getting his own 250GT into series production in the late 1950s, Enzo Ferrari explored the idea of getting a less expensive baby Ferrari into production.  Design proposals from his engineering staff centered on an inline, single overhead cam engine which was, in essence, 4 cylinders from the 3 liter V12 which powered Ferrari's 250.  The young Giorgetto Giugiaro, new on the job at Bertone, sketched a clean fastback coupe to clothe the tubular chassis of the little (1,032 cc) car.  The divided grille echoed the twin-nostril motif which had just appeared on Ferrari's Formula One racers.  Production of the car was licensed to the De Nora industrial concern, and began in 1962.

The hope was the ASA would, at around $6,000, offer the mystique of a Ferrari at half the price. But cars like the Fiat Abarth 1000 and Alfa Romeo Giulietta offered equal or better performance for about two-thirds the cost.  De Nora's production capacity was too limited to ratchet up volume enough to offer a more competitive price.  Total production over a period of five years amounted to something like 125 units.  But in an attempt to garner the publicity that comes with racing success, Giotto Bizzarrini (father of Ferrari's GTO) designed a sleek competition coupe, which was built in tiny numbers...

Near the end, there was also an update on the idea of a dual purpose GT for touring or occasional race use.  This was the Roll Bar Spider, offered in RB 411 (4 cylinder, 1100 cc) and also RB 613 (6 cylinder, 1300 cc) versions.  The bodywork presaged that of other cars with built-in roll bars (Corvette, notably) and it was a tidy package, but it came too late to save ASA.  The 6 cylinder ASA engine is a real rarity, as it was essentially one bank of a Ferrari V12.  It makes one wonder if it would have had greater success it they had made a lateral rather than longitudinal slice, for a compact V6.  But that's a story for another chapter…

Photo credits:

Top:  ASA 1000 GT /  Wikimedia

2nd from top:  ASA 1000 Berlinetta Competizione / Autodrome Paris

Bottom 2:  ASA RB 613 Spider / ASA Automobili

Forgotten Classic: The Graber Alvis

The car in the picture below is not a Bentley, though it has an English chassis.  And though the frontal design scheme may remind you of a Facel Vega, the body did not come from France.  It’s a 3 liter Alvis, bodied in Switzerland by Hermann Graber Carrosserie.  In the mid-fiftties Graber became the Alvis importer for Switzerland, and the cars were bodied under an arrangment that allowed duty-free imports of foreign chassis (there were no Swiss makes by then) as long as they were bodied by one of the several Swiss coachbuilders.  Graber, active from 1925 until 1970, was the best known and arguably the most successful of these, and also applied his talents to Aston Martin, Packard, Duesenberg, Bentley, Delahaye, and Talbot-Lago chassis.

Designer and critic Robert Cumberford, writing recently in Automobile, commented that no inspired car designs had ever emerged from the Swiss coachbuilding houses.   Based on the work Graber did before the war on a Duesenberg chassis and after the war on nearly a hundred Alvis chassis, I’d suggest that this is a rare case where the esteemed Mr. C. has gotten it wrong.  Perhaps the Duesenberg body pictured below was not a game-changer like Gordon Buehrig's Cord 810 from the year before, but in my view it was the only Duesenberg ever (out of scores of different custom designs, including 3 by Graber) on which the body looked as modern as the Duesy’s engine.  Note the way the tapered slope of the grille harmonizes with the teardrop fenders and the deftly tapered tail section.  The teardrop spare tire cover enclosing the similarly shaped license plate recess is also a deft touch.  Graber shortened the chassis of a 1934 Model J to give it more sporting proportions during this rebody performed in 1937.  In the last year of Duesenberg production, Graber succeeded in pulling the noble beast into the modern era.

After the war, he performed a similar service for England’s Alvis and France's Talbot-Lago, taking on Swiss distribution rights for both makes, dragging both into the midcentury automotive mainstream in terms of packaging, and beyond the mainstream in terms of craftsmanship and attention to detail.  Note the similarity of the black ‘55 Alvis below to the red '53 Talbot-Lago directly above it.  Decoration is limited; Graber relies on control of proportions and contours, along with the exposed wire wheels, to convey a sense of the machinery beneath the shell.  The nearly vertical chrome strip at the beginning of the rear fender forms seems a simplified version of that era's Cadillac, but unlike on the Caddy, the trim leans forward where it joins the sill trim, leading the eye ahead to those long hoods.  Only the grille shape, fog light vents and more subdued fender curvature differentiate the English car from the French one.

Graber designed a coupe with wraparound rear window during the same period and built two dozen of this TC108G model, shown below.  Willowbrook produced bodies to the same design in England, but these were costly and troublesome to build, so Alvis switched English body production to Park Ward after only 13 of these were completed.   Graber's design on the blue TC108G below it served as the template for the TD through TF series produced in about 1,500 copies in coupe and convertible form by Park Ward from 1959-67; these were big numbers for a specialist like Alvis.

Graber continued to produce up to ten special bodies a year during this period.  Later efforts provided a bit more identity to the Alvis, including the reverse slope rear window on the 1959 Panoramic TD21 cabriolet above, and lower stance emphasized by the broad grille and stacked headlights  of the 1965 Super cabrio below.  The 1967 Graber Super Coupe, the last of the line, seemed a perfect modern GT with its tall glassy cabin and Mercedes-like proportions, except for the somewhat leisurely 150 hp provided by the sturdy but aging 3 liter inline 6.  By then, Alvis had been acquired by Rover, which, after toying with the idea of using its then-new aluminum ex-Buick V8 in a replacement model, decided to halt Alvis production altogether.  After bodying a couple of prototype Rover P6-based sport coupes, Graber Coachworks suspended its coachbuilding operations in 1970, the year that Herman Graber died.

Photo credits:.

Top:  pantheonbasel.ch

2nd from top:  hemmings.com

3rd & 4th:  alvisarchives.com

5th:  classiccarcatalog.com

6th:  wikimedia.com

7th:  wikimedia.com

8th:  alvisarchives.com

9th:  christophegrohe.com

10th & 11th: alvisarchives.com

12th: supercars.net

On a Lonesome Highway in California

It's the slow season for tourists in central California, two days before the New Year.  You've been droning along sleepy two lane roads for hours since waking up at a tired little motel in the desert.  You'd like to break for lunch, and maybe take the pooch on a little walk.  You stop at a roadhouse that looks like it may not have changed since the 1950s. Given the pace of change in most of the state, it's mildly surprising to find some feature of the landscape that has resisted change.  But here it is...

You walk out back with the hound on a leash, and then you notice all the rattlesnake warning signs on the fences and so you decide to cancel the walk, buying off your floppy-eared pal with a treat and settling him in the car while you go inside to eat. Your phone thrums; a cell phone seems oddly out of place here, and you'd almost forgotten you had one in all those miles of unpopulated desert.   It's a text message from your friend Dan; you're supposed to visit Dan and Margaret in Watsonville later in the day…

"Where are you?"  

"Lunch stop in Cholome; not sure of spelling.  East of Paso Robles."

"Excellent almond waffles in Paso Robles.  You're in Cholame."

"Thanks."

"At the Jack Ranch Cafe?"

"Yep.  Too hungry to wait for Paso."

"You know that you're near the spot where James Dean crashed his Porsche and died, right?  The bacon-Ortega chile cheeseburger seems to be the hot call. "  

"Thought JD bought it closer to Salinas."  He'd been on the way to Salinas, anyway.  You remember that much.  Testing his 550 race car with a mechanic friend.

"Nope.  You're right there.  In fact, there's a memorial sign right outside the Jack Ranch Cafe.  Might be worth seeing the spot."

The sculpture outside was commissioned and donated by a Japanese businessman in the late 1970s.  It has a sort of Zen understatement about it, and manages to enhance the dignity of the old tree it enfolds. The stainless letters spell out Dean's lifespan (he was 24) and the sheet aluminum reminds you of how they used to build race cars.  You can imagine the stillness and fly-buzzing heat of early evening in late September just over sixty years ago, broken by the rasp of an air-cooled engine in the distance.  Number 130, it was…

                                     

Later on, you'll find out that forensic analysis concluded that Dean, having collected a speeding ticket in Bakersfield, was probably not speeding, maybe going only 55, and that he'd braked and swerved, but that the Ford turning across his path, and driven by a college student, was too big an obstacle to avoid.  That Rolf Wutherich, the mechanic, survived and never talked about it.  Later on, you'll hear that #130's engine and transmission were transferred to another car which was involved in a fatal racing accident, and that #130 fell off a truck on the way to a traffic safety exhibit, killing a truck driver, and that it eventually disappeared completely.  But you don't know any of that right now.  You reflect that it's fine you decided against having that beer with lunch, and you watch for rattlesnakes on the way back to your car.

Photo credits:

Top:  vendorgirl.com
Center:  the author
Bottom:  Porsche AG in welt.de