Have you ever wanted to travel back in time? What about for really mundane, terrible reasons? Like, instead of viewing monumental moments of history or making small changes that will cascade to better humankind’s situation overall, you just wanted to go to Boston’s former red-light and general smut district and see what sort of cars were there? If that’s something that’s been a dream of yours, but money or medical issues are preventing you from using one of our nation’s fine bonded and licensed time-travel agencies, then boy, do I have good news for you!
The good news is that there exists a nice chunk of video from 1985, shot originally by Boston’s WGBH-TV station, which you likely remember as the producers of Zoom. In a slight departure from the usual content of shows like Zoom, this bit of footage shows the traffic around an area of Boston known as the “Combat Zone.”
This area of town was once lauded by the Wall Street Journal as being a “sexual Disneyland.” I mean, I assume that was praise?
But we’re here to talk about cars, not imagining what a carnal version of Space Mountain would be like! So let’s check out the footage:
I was first made aware of this footage by our own The Bishop, who noted that the footage really seemed to capture what normal, everyday cars were like in the mid-’80s. And, generally, I think he’s pretty correct: this footage really does seem to capture what the overall carscape was like in the middle of the ’80s, at least on the East Coast.
Things felt a little different out West, with more imports, proportionately, I think. Also, these clips don’t show any old air-cooled Volkswagens, which I remember as being fairly common even well into the ’80s.
Here’s another GBH-shot video, highlighting Boston’s double-parking woes, and it also really captures the overall feeling of mid-’80s traffic:
Let’s take a look at some of the automotive recurring characters of the era! I do want to note that Ford Tempo up in the topshot, because those are all but extinct now, and were once surprisingly common. Now you’re more likely to run into a Sasquatch on the road.
Oh, and speaking of once common and now essentially extinct, that car up there is the poster child for that phenomenon: a first-gen Honda Accord sedan. That one looks like a 1980 (or maybe 1981), the exact same year and color as my mom’s car in that era. That one is a five-speed instead of an automatic like mom’s, but still.
These Accords were wildly popular, a best-selling car that really made the Big Three fearful of Japan, and now they’re pretty much extinct, except in captivity. I see more unrestored old Beetles trundling around than Accords a decade newer. Where did they all go?
Even the second-gen Accords, which arrived in 1982, have all essentially vanished. I dated a woman who had one of these in the late ’90s, so they were still around then, at least.
Cars like this Chevy Celebrity were the water in which we swam; ubiquitous and ignorable, these boxy things were everywhere, a filler like rice in the poke bowl of the automotive landscape, if you’ll permit me some metaphor mixing.
If the Celebrity was rice, this blue Saab 900 was a big chunk of tuna: less common, but tastier. These were interesting cars for people who wanted something a bit less normal, and they got it, starting their cars by reaching down to their key in the floor. That brown Chevy van behind it was another unseen-but-everywhere sort of vehicle, too.
Look, there’s another brown van, this one a Ford Econoline (I was wrong earlier, so thanks to commenters for catching that) lurking at the right edge there, but I want to talk about the Mercedes-Benz SL there, which I think is a 450 SL, with the big 4.5-liter V8. That was a classy ride!
Also, see that Ford Maverick ahead and to the right of the Benz? With the huge dent in the rear quarter panel?
Somehow all Mavericks seemed to be in this general condition throughout the 1980s. They weren’t even all that old when this footage was taken – that car is probably, what, nine or 10 years old? The oldest it could be is 15, which is not that far off from the average age of a car on US roads today. Cars just aged harder back in the day, and didn’t really last as long.
Speaking of aging harder, see that Ford Granada reversing into the spot up there, in front of the Maverick? There’s a detail there that seemed to be part of every single Granada Ford made: the broken reverse light lens:
You can see it on the right there, from the video. And on the left, I have the Granada used in the movie No Country for Old Men, which also has a reverse light lens broken! They all did, for some reason. I think they either came from the factory that way, or Ford was making reverse light lenses out of spun sugar or something like that.
Look at this mass of ’80s iron! There are a couple of interesting specimens up front, a BMW 3-Series, and to its left, what seems to be a 1983 or so Toyota Celica notchback! I always liked the pop-forward lights on those. There’s a Chrysler K-Car parked on the left, too, and what could be the D-pillar of a Volvo 240 wagon?
This has to be the jewel of these bits of footage, though: a second-generation (’81-’83) Dodge Challenger, which was a re-badged Mitsubishi Galant Lambda. This one is particularly fetching in its two-tone red-and-gray paintwork.
If you’re nostalgic for mid-’80s carscapes, I hope this helped. I think if anything, it probably took a bit of luster off your nostalgia?
Anyway, I wonder what’s playing at The Pilgrim today?
Top graphic image: Screen grab, WGBH
I would have been about 6 years old here, I have flashes of memories of streets like these in southeastern MA.
I was in high school and college throughout the 80s. Back then if you had a 15 year old car, it was the oldest car around (I drove a ‘69 Triumph TR6 and was well aware that my car was antique)
Now I look at school parking lots and 15 year old cars are common
The average age of the US fleet of cars is 12 or 13 years old, so there are a lot of 15 year old cars roaming the earth.
This. When I was little, my mom traded in her Corvair for a new 1970 Beetle. At the time, the Corvair was so rusted out, she said if you lifted up the carpet, you could see through to the road. At max, the car was 10 years old, and had already been painted.
Related: I saw a Hummer H3 with “Classic Vehicle” plates the other day. It’s at least 20 years old.
I was just thinking about my first car, a 1982 Datsun 200SX. When I got it, it was a rusted-out beater with 211,000 miles. I paid $450 for it and it was one of the oldest, most used
-up cars in the school parking lot.
I got it in the fall of 1993. It was all of eleven years old. The same age as my current daily driver.
This consistently blows my mind. I have a first gen Tacoma (28 years old) that I don’t see as particularly old. Hell, my DD is a 2011 XB that is showing absolutely no signs of nearing the end of the road.
My 8y/o son however talks as if my Tacoma was built in the 1920’s. The thing is we could drive 2 miles to the grocery store and see at least one more first gen on the trip (live in a fairly rust-free area).
It’s wild to think that when I bought my ’74 Spitfire, it was only a couple years older than my ’11 BMWs are today. And it had already been completely restored, despite having fewer miles on it than my ’11 128i convertible does. The good old days could be fun, but they definitely weren’t always good.
Thanks for the reminder of the gray slushy disgusting mess that is a northern city in winter. I don’t miss that at all.
I live in a northern Canadian city- literally we still have snow, people have been saying how dirty and grey the place is, I say give it a week
As someone in a Southern Canadian city, I still wanna move to Vancouver to escape the snow permanently.
I love Vancouver metro and the climate’s so mild you can live outside all year, so a distressing number of people do. Also, land is tight since it’s squoze between the mountains to the north, the US border to the south, the Sound to the west and the farm set-asides to the east. Don’t want to think how much my old house there is worth now…
The Sunshine Coast is quite lovely but it’s on the wrong side of a ferry.
As an American, I never considered there was a “Southern Canada”
We’re the second largest country by land mass. We actually have land in most, if not all, of the navigational directions.
We also have SO MANY lakes. Which is my favourite part.
That’s actually where 90+% of Canadians live.
Looks like Boston loved their GM cars. Nice find man. Enjoyed your article as usual.
In the 80’s there was a GM factory in MA, I believe in Framingham. That Celebrity sedan was likely made there. I’m reaching back deep into childhood memory here, but I seem to remember those Framingham cars having a little decal with the image of a Minuteman soldier and the outline of the state of MA, or something to that effect.
Or maybe it was a license plate, but it was something like that.
I went there twice in my life, once on a school trip, and another time in Boy Scouts for Field trips
That’s awesome! That must have been a fun trip. When I was a kid, our neighbor was a retired guy that had used to work there.
The Ranger at our local Scout camp was a GM employee from their New Jersey plant, assigned to work there as part of some jobs bank deal during the period when the plant was considered idled instead of officially closed. He was paid by GM until the plant status switched to closed, then went onto the BSA’s payroll for probably way less money
It was in Framingham. I went on a tour in 82 or so with the Boy Scouts. Its an Adesa Auctions site now i believe
Framingham GM plant. Less than 20 miles outside of town
I rewatched CHiPs a few years back when it was on Prime and had a similar experience just looking at how much more interesting America’s streets and highways used to be.
Had an 82 Accord, 85 Celebrity, and 88 Saab. Ah, the good old days. All the Accords disintegrated into FeO3 a LONG time ago. Mine went 269k miles before it did in its 13 years of life.
Ford launched the Taurus that year, and you can see why its design was a big deal even though now it seems really generic.
JFC, a good number of cars seems to have taken quite a beating!
Boston drivers have high insurance rates and they earn that
I mean it’s the town that invented the “surprise left turn” — traffic light is just green. Sometimes the left turn is protected, sometimes not. You don’t know, but the ten ppl behind you do, and they’ll let you know. The only certainty is that, if it is a protected turn, it’ll switch at some point in the cycle. You’ll know bc that’s when opposing traffic will start coming at you.
that and the proud tradition of not having street signs is the city’s way of saying “if you’re not from here, don’t drive here.” Man I miss that town.
Living in rural midwest America in the mid ’80s, our carscape was similar, but without the foreign vehicles.
Everybody bought Chevys, Fords, Dodges, AMCs, Buicks, Lincolns, Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, Mercurys, Plymouths, Chryslers, and GMCs.
You might occasionally see a VW, but all my circle of friends and their parents bought domestic vehicles in the eighties. The rich people in town drove Cadillacs.
The “combat zone” was named such partly due to the many soldiers and sailors who were likely to frequent the area. Even at its peak it was not all that much – this video probably captured 70% of it. It has now been all but completely gentrified, including a residential tower that seems to be empty because international rich people used it to park some cash and it is two blocks from the edge of where the zone used to be. Providence has long taken over the adult entertainment in the area.
Double parking remains a problem in various parts of the city, although not so much where that film was shot.
Note all the dents in the cars – my family kept a “city car” specifically for trips into town – it had a couple of dents which were never repaired both to scare off other aggressive drivers and so you would be less annoyed by the addition of another dent.
I commuted in and out of Boston on the SE Expressway, and had a dented up Nova. when I want to change lanes, I could swerve back and forth in my lane, and nice cars would get out of my way to change lanes.
That’s the Boston I remember!
A big reason that when I go to my office in suburban Boston or to Boston itself, I prefer my Land Rover Disco I over my wagon. The Land Rover is big enough, scruffy enough, and has big black steel bumpers that even Boston drivers don’t mess with it too much. The BMW feels like it has targets painted on it down there
An era when it was physically impossible to create a window surround without chroming it fully.
I don’t understand why that’s still popular on current models; it feels so old.
On AMCs, the window trim was usually polished extruded aluminum, rather than chrome, signature they inherited from Nash
The van in the shot with the Benz is a Ford, shockingly shiny for being a 1968-74 model.
Boston is particularly hard on cars, with its’ combination of all the automotive indignities of city life (look at all those dents!) with all the northern ones (almost every one of them is coated in salty slush). No wonder Torch remembers seeing more older cars in the comparatively gentle traffic and “winters” of Greensboro, NC.
Wandered through the Combat Zone in 81 on a visit to a Bostonian friend. It was much friendlier and safer feeling than its Berlin equivalent which I’d explored 6 months previously.
I had forgotten just how grungy and old even new cars looked back then.
Some of it’s the oppressive overcast winter lighting in New England and some is the slush, road dirt and rust. I can smell the rust 40 years later.
Oh, I know – I live and grew up in Pittsburgh. The sun barely shines from Nov to March here, and we get the same slush and salt.
It’s more a 5 year old car just looking tired and worn out. That Granada was a sorry sight, and probably only 6 or 7 years old. The Maverick was praying for a quick, painless death.
Some of it was also how quickly car design was moving toward the more aerodynamic “Euro” look, a brand new Dodge Diplomat looked like a 10 year old used car fresh off the showroom floor, and like it was from a totally different era than the K-car variants sharing space with it. Which, it sort of was
This too – the Tempo almost looks out of place in this montage.
I always thought Granadas and Mavericks were sold old and worn out looking straight from the lot…
(I grew up about two hours northeast of you so I’m familiar with the look and feel of the general area, particularly in the 80’s)
I lived in Elmira,New York for a year.It probably still looks like 1986 there.
Honestly Elmira looked far better in the 80s than it does now.
I think I know WGBH best for This Old House and its various spinoffs. I didn’t realize they did Zoom too. Unless the ’90s reboot was done by someone else.
In what may be a further public media connection, there’s a nonzero chance that at least one of those cars visited the Magliozzi brothers’ garage. They more commonly known as Click and Clack to the rest of us.
I had my eye out for their Dodge Dart but there are surprisingly few pre-K Mopars. Even the freshly washed Challenger’s really a Mitsubishi.
W
Gravity
Bong
Hit
I think they produced Julia Child too
Yes, Russell Morash was a producer at GBH, he did The French Chef with Julia Child, as well as This Old House, The New Yankee Workshop, Victory Garden, and probably some others. He was sort of the Lorne Michaels of nonprofit educational programming
I can still hear the deedlely deedly deedelydeedlydedely BAH in my head when I see WGBH written out.
That synth jingle also now lives rent free in my head thanks to this article.
If I can find a really clean sample or recreation, it’s gonna be a notification sound.
Oh yeah!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUWygGsyCyY
Harvard U kept the curved window on the 3rd floor in the square of Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe
And their good friend Mahatma Koat
Don’t be too hard on (no pun intended) the old Combat Zone. Arguably the most famous carnoisseur in America, Jay Leno, got his start right there in places like The Pilgrim. It was about 10 years earlier than this film, but no less seedy. I used to take the train into Boston and sneak into clubs (they didn’t really try to keep anyone out) to see, um, young comedians try out their material when I was in high school. It was an education.
Huh, the Porno Theater tag is disappointingly but unsurprisingly light on posts. Somebody get on that!
Giant Screen! Color!
Missing from that experience is the smell. Traffic used to reek! Same era as the LA smog.
I miss the smell of hydrocarbons and burning ozone in the morning.
That raw unburnt fuel.
That sweet, sweet smell of atomized lead.
And the indoor spaces all stunk of cigarettes, stale or otherwise. Pick your poison.
I remember those days in August when you could actually taste the air. Ugh.
I’m not a fan of dealing with emissions equipment but it definitely serves a purpose.
The broken reverse-light lenses are weird. It seems very specific to have just the middle lens broken like that.
I suggest making a purchase from the insurance machine while you’re there. Then if you are unable to return to the present because you created a cause-effect disturbance in the timeline which makes you not exist now, then your kin (if they do exist) can collect a time-death benefit.
Protip: don’t list your kids as beneficiaries.
On the one hand that possibility is highly overstated and the timeline’s more resilient than we’ve been led to think.
On the other, someone should get some really preppy clothes to Otto and convince him that it’s worth waiting months for a buzzcut to grow back out just to prank his dad.
Also, given what inflation has done to super premium prices, get to the ice cream store. And, if there’s time, maybe warn people about Rolf Harris or something
Teenager just starting to drive in the mid 1980’s. no nostalgia, lots of bad memories.
I like to watch the tv series from the 70’s and 80’s rerun on streaming channels for cars and trucks spotting. Streets of San Fransisco is the the best.
McMillan and Wife is also some good car spotting – including Commissioner McMillan’s Fuselage Imperial and 1972 Lincoln Continental.
Another “mystery wheel” show from that group that has some cool rides – Bannechek. Even though he’s usually chauffeured around in a Rolls convertible, every now and again, Bannechek will drive his bright yellow De Tomasso Pantera!
Adam-12 is great for the cars.
It almost every episode there’s a golden Brown Mustang coupe. And it’s not stock footage, it’s specific scenes to the episode and the car is there in the background.
Yeah same. I remember watching that show. My dad pointed out that Ford was a big sponsor so of course we saw a bunch of LTD’s screeching around corners with hubcaps flying off.
The big Mercurys did that too.
Ask me how I know….
Or in between seasons the auto sponsor would change, and magically so would the cars without mention by any of the characters. I think Brady Bunch did that, went from Chrysler products to GM, or vice versa.
Columbo has some great cars! not just his “hero” peugeot.
Starsky & Hutch and Rockford Files are my personal favs.
One thing you see a lot in these old shows is how easily a mid-70s full size car can go right over a city curb with no obvious damage to the wheels or suspension. No days, several thousands of dollars of damage would be done, even to most CUVs, trying to do the same thing with 3-4″ of sidewall versus the 8-10″ wrapped around those 14-15″ steelies.
You’re so right about the durability of 60’s70’s cars vs today.
Meanwhile, I saw Jim Rockford’s Firebird at a Cars and Coffee in Malibu years ago. Instead of the ashtray, there was a custom panel w/ RCA jacks where the mics were plugged in for in-car dialogue scenes…
Hunter is available on the Roku channel. I didn’t remember this from its original airing, but it’s a running joke on the show that the main character somehow ruins a car in every episode, so the department always assigns him the worst car in the motorpool.
Kids! Do you want to know what U.S. auto malaise was?
If you want to see it in a fictionalized form, forgotten but cool 80s detective show Spenser: For Hire was filmed on location in Boston for its 3 season run. It’s all this plus Spenser’s ’65 Mustang fastback, Hawk’s succession of rare BMW coupes, and all the Chevy Caprice cop cars you can stand. Plus a bonus Merkur Scorpio that Susan drives in the later episodes.
Spenser star Robert Urich was also Dan Tanna in “Vega$” and drove a 55-57 Tbird!
My favorite part was how he lived in an old hanger or something, so he’d drive the T-bird right into his living room area. I would love to do that, have my car right there as I watch tv.
That Saab is a rarity in the US, a five-door 900. Those were only sold here in 1979 and ’80 before being replaced by the four-door notchback for ’81. If we could see its rear end, we could say definitively which year it is, as the taillights widened onto the tailgate for 1980. Maybe that’s visible in the video, I haven’t watched it.
That SL is indeed a 450, and we can pinpoint its vintage, too, to 1973, as it lacks the battering ram bumpers fitted from ’74 on. The R107 was also imported in 1972, but badged as a 350SL, despite carrying the 4.5-liter V8.
Good Eyes – Yes, that is indeed a ’73 350SL which has had it’s badge updated to 450SL
There was actually a recall of sorts for that – you’d bring your new-ish 350SL into the dealer for maintenance and it would magically come out as a 450SL…
These Saabs were well liked by old-Boston wealthy people – until fairly recently it was not unusual to see even these low-volume versions around town.
I was last in Boston 20 years ago, and I remember at one point being in a part of town—Bunker Hill, maybe?—where it seemed like we had suddenly entered a Saab wonderland. 900s and 9000s and 9-3s as far as the eye could see!
The green 9-3 convertible was mine.
Username checks out! I came here to say the same thing about the 900.
There was a pristine black 900 5 door at the SOC last summer. IIRC it was a 1990 – definitely a later year – that had been imported from Australia.
Saab had so many body styles and variants of the 99 and 900 that we didn’t get here.