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Hemmings Motor News Blog

Hemmings Motor News has been around since 1954. We're proud of our heritage, but we're also more than the Hemmings full of classifieds that your father subscribed to. Aside from new editorial content every month in Hemmings, we have three monthly magazines: Hemmings Muscle Machines, Hemmings Classic Car and Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car.

While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.

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Open Diff – Where Was Your Town’s Automobile Row?

Posted March 05, 2019 9:00 AM by dstrohl
Pathfinder Tags: classic auto Discussion

In larger cities, automobile rows stretched as long as a mile, chock-full of automobile dealerships with their neon ablaze, service stations with rotating signs, and parts stores that made it possible to work on the cars you bought three doors down.

By no means were automobile rows relegated to big cities, however. Pretty much every locale across the country had its own smaller version of concentrated auto-related businesses. Some, like Pittsburgh, even had factories or assembly plants anchoring their automobile rows.

And then, from the Fifties through the Eighties, a confluence of factors led to the wholesale dispersal of automobile rows.

What town are you from, and what was its auto culture like?

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Re: Open Diff – Where Was Your Town’s Automobile Row?

03/05/2019 12:48 PM

Hingham, Massachusetts in the shadow of Boston: Not much.

A smattering of various gasoline stations with repair bays in various places. Maybe a used car dealer or two along Rte. 3A near the old shipyard. To find franchised dealers you had to go to Weymouth or Quinzy. Later in the 70's, dealerships started to pop up down along the Rockland and Norwell borders near the Rte. 3 exit. Best Chevrolet was the only dealer I can think of back in the 60's and 70's but I can't recall their original business location.

Hingham has gone from a nice middle-class sleepy bedroom community near Boston to the land of Lexus and Mercedes. There are still regular folks there, but they are slowly being priced out of town. The house my parents purchased in 1962 for $18,000 last listed for about $800,000. I wouldn't be able to afford to buy the house I grew up in.

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Re: Open Diff – Where Was Your Town’s Automobile Row?

03/05/2019 2:50 PM

Originally (up to early 1970's) it was 4th Avenue, in Yuma, AZ, then they ALL moved south, out of the center of town, to (32nd Street) Old Highway 80, beyond the "curve" where 32nd street merged into 4th Avenue...literally a curve.

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Re: Open Diff – Where Was Your Town’s Automobile Row?

03/06/2019 6:36 PM

Detroit Michigan. Woodward Avenue. Woodward Dream Cruise, need I say more?

http://www.woodwarddreamcruise.com/

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