The north entrance seems to be the only one that Westfield didn't redesign with the 00s expansion, though it's clearly not original to the 60s either. I'm guessing this was redone around the same time Mervyn's was built, since it certainly has that 90s look to it! When the new restaurants were put in, the arch feature above the door was replaced with a big rectangular faux window, similar to the other entrances around the mall.
I certainly wasn't expecting to see an Oldsmobile Ninety Eight in one of these photos! Maybe I could understand it in Tacoma, but even then, there probably aren't too many Ninety Eights on the road these days! At least I think that is a Ninety Eight, it could actually be an Oldsmobile Eighty Eight Regency. After Oldsmobile dropped the Ninety Eight after 1996, they put the Ninety Eight's front end on a special model of the Eighty Eight called the Regency for a couple of years. I know that sounds strange, why would two different cars have the same exact front end? Well, welcome to 1990s GM! With decisions like that, it is probably no wonder Oldsmobile stopped existing at all just a few years later!
ReplyDeleteThe fact that the Oldsmobile is sticking so far out of the parking spot makes me think it is a Ninety Eight because those were longer. In fact, the 1980s Ninety Eight was downsized considerably from the 1970s versions, and some of the more traditional Oldsmobile/Buick buyers lamented the small size of their otherwise higher-end Oldsmobile model so in the 1990s, GM used the same wheelbase of the 1980s model and added an extra 9 inches to the body to make it look like it had a big trunk. In many ways, they then resembled some of the 1970s land yachts, but were still front-wheel drive like the 1980s models.
To put things in context, a 1990s Ninety Eight would be 13.4" longer than that Nissan Murano which is also in the photo! Of course, something like a Tahoe, much less a Suburban, would be much bigger still and this mall was certainly built in an era when land yachts were common so I'm guessing the Oldsmobile owner did a bad job of parking or this parking lot is really not fit for modern car standards! Maybe it was restriped with smaller spots sometime in the 1980s when it was predicted that cars would get smaller and stay small. Well, that was certainly an incorrect prediction! The asphalt here doesn't look that old though so maybe it is a modern striping job, but they were under pressure to fit as many spots in as possible, kind of like an HEB parking lot.
I was wondering what that big old thing was! I had guessed Buick, but I'm not surprised Oldsmobile was making similar cars. I can't help but feel like those "land yacht" sedans were even less practical than a lot of the crossovers/SUVs of today!
DeleteLoading things into a station wagon or SUV is easier than putting them into a sedan, even one with a land yacht-sized trunk. The 1970s land yacht sedans also had the problem that they had a higher lift-over than 1990s+ sedans (the area with the taillights was usually fixed in older sedans and didn't open with the decklid like they do now), though lift-over height is an issue with some SUVs today too in a different way.
DeleteThat said, we have a family friend who had one of those 1990s Oldsmobile Ninety Eights. He was into R/C airplanes and he'd use his Oldsmobile to carry his planes, which are quite large. He had no problem carrying them around. The added advantage is that everything would be hidden in a sedan's trunk, which may not necessarily be the case in a van or SUV.
One of those big station wagons from that era (GM stopped making them in 1996) would have an advantage over a modern big SUV in the sense that those big station wagons weren't really designed to have 3 rows of seats (though rear-facing ones could be added if one simply had to have seats back there...they certainly weren't recommended though!) and so the entire rear wagon part was designed for cargo, which could be expanded even further by a simple lowering of the rear seat back. With modern SUVs, the third-row might be hard to fold (the seats might have to be taken out entirely) and ones with van-like captain's chairs on the second row would have even further complication.
While not a land yacht of a wagon, my mother's old 2002 VW Passat wagon had a lot more room than even really big 2-row SUVs of today like the Jeep Grand Cherokee! And since it was lower, it was easier to slide things in and out of it. Wagons were really perfect, but of course they didn't have the profit margins of SUVs so they went away! And even otherwise, the 'kind of' wagons of today don't have the room of that Passat, even if they are physically as big or bigger.