The hood was up all evening, and I understood why about two seconds after I looked under it. The car is jade green, wide whitewalls, a chrome grille with enough bars to trap a small animal, and a ram standing on the nose. Then you get to the engine bay and the century changes. A 1950 Dodge Coronet convertible.
What the 1950 Dodge Coronet Started As
Out of the factory this was not a fast car and was never pretending to be. The Coronet was Dodge’s top trim when it arrived in 1949, and in 1950 a buyer got a 230 cubic inch flathead six making 103 horsepower, tied to Chrysler’s Fluid Drive, which was a semi-automatic that let you leave it in gear at a stoplight and feel clever about it. It was a heavy, calm, dignified thing. The styling is all early post-war, the fenders still half swallowed by the body, chrome laid on by the yard.
The convertible is the rare one. Dodge built somewhere around eighteen hundred Coronet convertibles that year, which is nothing, and most of those are long gone. This one had its top up on a warm June evening, which tells you the owner was more worried about the interior than about posing.
The Mopar V8 That Lives There Now
The flathead six is gone. In its place is a Chrysler small block, and the chrome valve covers say Mopar Performance right on them, so nobody is being coy about it. Around it sits everything the original never had, an aluminum radiator, a modern alternator, an air conditioning compressor with its lines routed carefully out of sight, and a big chrome air cleaner sitting on top like a hat.
Purists have opinions about a 1950 Dodge Coronet with air conditioning in it. Mine is simpler. A car that gets driven is worth more to me than a car that gets trailered, and this one clearly gets driven, because the plate frame says Muskoka and the Ontario plate reads ITSA1950. Somebody takes this thing up the highway. The inner fenders are painted the same jade as the body, which is the detail that tells you how much work went in. Nobody paints an engine bay that colour by accident.
Ivory Wheel, Red Leather, One Small Flag
The best frame in this set is the one through the side glass. The dash and door are the same green as the outside, the seats are deep red leather, and the steering wheel is a big ivory ring with a chrome horn bar across it. Sitting on the seat is a folded cloth with cartoon characters on it and a small Canadian flag clipped to the windshield post. That is the whole thing right there. Somebody restored this car properly and then used it like a car, and left their stuff on the seat.
I shot the interior from outside and back a step, which is the only way to keep the green of the dash and the red of the seats both honest. Push the lens up against the glass and you lose the reflection of the sky on the door top, and that reflection is doing a lot of work in the frame.
This was a Monday night in Richmond Hill, a Toronto suburb up at the north end of the GTA, in a plaza lot with a Swiss Chalet on one side and a blue hot rod parked two spaces over. I shot it on the Leica Q3 in what was left of the evening sun, no flash, nothing moved. There is another car from the same night here, and the rest of the work is in the projects.
Thanks for looking!
