Here’s another round of the vintage insured photos I rescued from the recycle bin at the insurance company twenty-odd years ago. I saved them purely for the cars in the pictures, but nowadays I can appreciate the buildings too.
Cars and main streets everywhere are getting more boring by the day. National chains, national bars, national restaurants-all with a hefty dose of cheap plastic-and a silver silvermist rash of combovers driven by portly consumers. So it’s always interesting to see what things looked like a few decades ago.
You know you’re in Illinois when you see Old Style beer signs. There are still a ton of them in my area, even in 2022. The two Cutlasses in this shot show just how popular these cars were. I remember seeing Colonnade Cutlass Supremes into the early ’90s around here, though most were seriously dissolved by then.
When’s the last time you saw a front wheel drive Pontiac Phoenix? Believe it or not, I did see one in downtown Davenport about ten years ago. My principal in grade school had one of these, an ’80 or ’81 in burgundy. I don’t remember him having problems with it, but he did trade it in on a gunmetal gray 1986 Accord LXi sedan, which he drove well into the Nineties.
Anyway you slice it, things were quite a bit more diverse back then transportation-wise, albeit not necessarily better!