San Francisco Street Sighting - 1964 Ford Galaxie 500

I've always been kind of ambivalent toward the 1964 Ford full-size range. I like the '61, '63, '65, '66 and others but the '64 has always looked slightly unusual to me. I can't quite put my finger on it. In recent years I've warmed up to them somewhat.

Pleasanton Street Sighting - 1972 Ford Galaxie 500 Coupe

It's taken a long time, but here it is. Street Sighting number 500. To celebrate, I picked a car with that number in its name. Here's a 1972 Ford Galaxie 500 coupe.

Oakland Street Sighting - 1965 Ford Galaxie 500

I love the 1965 Ford Galaxie. Yes, I'm biased because my father's first car was a '65 Galaxie, but I also like the way they look. I like the sharply creased body lines, simple and clean without appearing too generic. It's a departure from the '64 Galaxie, with stacked quad headlights, a formal roofline and a slightly jutting coffin-nose grille. The Galaxie was moving upmarket, with the addition of the new LTD as its top model. The Galaxie itself was available with a range of options from stripped fleet special to a nice big family car.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1966 Ford Galaxie 500 Convertible

I've gotten word from friends back east that another late-winter storm has been dumping tons of snow and frigid temperatures on them. Fear not, friends, spring is coming. In the meantime, have a classic red convertible.

Santa Cruz Street Sighting - 1965 Ford Galaxie 500

I thought it was appropriate for my first post of 2013 to be about a white 1965 Ford Galaxie 500. My father was the one who first got me interested in cars at a very young age. The first car he owned was a white 1965 Ford Galaxie 500 coupe with a 289 V8 and an automatic transmission. The Galaxie wasn't kept very long, but it was a nice car for a high-schooler in the '70s. I've loved them for many years, and seeing one at car shows always makes me happy. Not many of them show up on the street, though.

Santa Cruz Street Sighting - 1961 Ford Galaxie Sunliner convertible

There are a lot of banner years for car styling, but 1961 is not usually considered one of them. At least not on the level of, say, 1957. To me, 1961 is generally classified as the final year for tail fins on a lot of Detroit's cars. Ever since their pinnacle in '59 on the Cadillacs, fins were falling out of favor and were gradually being phased out.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1968 Ford Galaxie 500

With space at a premium, city dwellers often choose vehicles that are easy to park and will fit in small spaces. Not so the owner of this fantastic maroon 1968 Ford Galaxie 500 sedan, a car that probably has enough steel in it to build two Smart Fortwos and another four Vespa scooters. But screw those. San Francisco already has too many Smart cars and Vespas. Big boats are a dying breed and few of them are as straight and clean as this. Most are beaters that earn their keep until the day when their owners send them to an unceremonious death at Schnitzer Steel. This one looks like a car the owner is proud of and wants to drive, and has been shown the love a classic deserves.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 convertible

I don't know what it is about convertibles and the color red, but they sure go together. This week we'll take a look at some.

First up is a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 convertible, a full-size drop-top cruiser that dwarfs most anything parked nearby. That fact is proven even better by the fellow who parked a Smart Fortwo next to it.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1964 Ford Galaxie Country Squire

It's summer road trip season, so I thought I'd put together another station wagon special feature set. Last time it was "Big Three" wagons, one model each from Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. It was a formula which worked pretty well here - except that in today's market climate, Chrysler is no longer one of the Big Three and for a couple of years at least, GM was no longer #1. That, and I don't have any more Chrysler wagons in the archives at present.

So, at any rate, let's begin with Ford. Our specimen is a 1964 Ford Galaxie Country Squire in what appears to be Sunlight Yellow (or Phoenician Yellow) with the ubiquitous Squire faux-wood trim and Medium Palomino vinyl upholstery. Another of the many wonderful old barges earning their keep and testing their parking brakes in San Francisco, this Country Squire looks like it's lived an interesting life. While it was built one year before the introduction of the nifty dual-swing tailgate that could be opened using hinges on the bottom or the side, this wagon does have a rear hatch with an opening rear window that can be rolled down inside the door. That's something you can't get on a lot of new wagons or SUVs.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1970 Ford XL SportsRoof

I'm going to say straight up that this is one I've wanted to get rid of for the better part of a year now. I shot the pictures in spring 2009 before I even started this blog, in the hopes of submitting them to Jalopnik.com for Murilee Martin's now-discontinued "Down On the Street" weekend feature. Due to the crappy camera and bad timing (half in shade and half in evening sunlight, right down the middle of the quarter panel), I needed a better profile shot. Since the location of this 1970 Ford XL SportsRoof is kind of out of my way usually, I didn't bother to seek it out for a while.
Then, I found out that this semester I had a drawing class down on Townsend, and this car lives only a couple of blocks off of my route to class. So, for five straight Fridays I walked past it, waiting for the right light. Honestly, I was uneasy because the street has security cameras right above the car's usual parking space and I didn't want to make the wrong impression on the neighborhood. No harm, no foul.

I'm kind of ambivalent about this car. I like its profile. I like its front to a degree. The back end is kind of a mess though, and the fastback roofline is fake. You get nice sail panels, but the rear window is a standard notchback angle and ends up resulting in a giant blind spot without the aerodynamic improvement of a fastback roof.
1970 was getting toward the end of the Galaxie's production run. The model was already 11 years old and '70 would be the last year for hideaway headlights. It was also pretty much the last model with sporting pretensions, as Galaxie became a more formal fullsize car. The XL designation refers to the luxury edition, and was dropped after this year (I suspect because Galaxie would soon become a strippo version of the fullsize body for 1971). This one still features Magnum 500 mag wheels and dual exhausts. The color is a decidedly un-sporting brown which appears oddly different in good light.
As far as condition goes, this is no shining example. It looks all right from 20 feet or perhaps from down the block. It makes me sad how a vehicle can change for the worse over a year and a half period. Take a look at the profile shot. The busted mirror is still busted, but now there's a big dent in the fender and the hood has bent corners and sprung hinges from where it's apparently popped open and peeled back while driving. That had to have been scary.
Despite all its warts, I can't remember the last time I saw any 1970 Galaxie other than this one, let alone a SportsRoof XL model. It's also one of the last relatively cool Galaxies I've seen. And perhaps most importantly, this beast of a car is still surviving in Yank-tank-averse San Francisco. That's a very good thing indeed.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1966 Ford Country Sedan

This week I decided to do another themed series of features. Like the Big Three Vans series I did a few months ago, this will also deal with some of Detroit's finest - and not-so-fine - family haulers. That's right, this week we'll be looking at Big Three Station Wagons.

For starters, let's look at Ford's offering. This 1966 Country Sedan was one of their larger cars during the era, based on the full-size Galaxie. I've featured a Country Sedan before, but it was a 1963 model and in much worse condition. Interestingly, while reading up on this car I learned that the Country Sedan and its faux-wood-paneled twin, the Country Squire, were sold as their own respective models until 1969, when they were ultimately lumped together in the Galaxie line.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1963 Ford Galaxie Country Sedan

For every super-clean classic car I see on the streets, it seems like there's one in deplorable condition. Such cars often look like they've been lived in, or broken into, or abandoned. And then there's one like this, which despite looking straight out of the ghetto....

...actually lives one block from the world-famous Painted Lady Victorian houses in Alamo Square. You know, those multicolored houses on the hill that everyone recognizes when they see pictures of San Francisco. Those babies can go for over $3 million. And then there's this little old blight on the neighborhood, a well-used but not well-loved 1963 Ford Galaxie Country Sedan.
Let's start with the obvious: this "Country Sedan" is a wagon. No need to remind me. It's actually badged Country Sedan and it won't be the last car featured here to bear that name (hint, hint). A Country Sedan is a Country Squire without the fake wood paneling. A squire refers to an assistant knight or village leader, not a station wagon. Yet it was Ford's name for any vehicle with the fake wood, even on the Ranchero, for decades. Silly Ford.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1963 Ford Galaxie 500 Town Sedan

One of my favorite years of the Ford Galaxie is 1963, a model year where everything just looked right somehow. I loved it enough to buy a 1:18 scale model of one (Sun Star makes a fantastic '63 Galaxie 500XL coupe), and to photograph them when I see one on the street.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1968 Ford Galaxie XL

Owners of old cars sometimes hide them from the prying eyes of the public. My strategy for finding interesting old iron is pretty simple: walk around looking for chrome bumpers. Usually I end up finding a generic pickup truck and continue on my way, but sometimes I snag something like this 1968 Ford Galaxie XL fastback. This big beast was parked in an dead-end alley in a space way too small to get out of without constant jockeying or perhaps an "accidental" nudge. Judging by the sheer mass of it, I doubt it would be very difficult to push a Corolla or Civic out of the way. Well, it might scratch the chrome on the bumpers.