{"id":10079,"date":"2016-03-18T00:05:08","date_gmt":"2016-03-18T04:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=10079"},"modified":"2016-03-18T08:07:28","modified_gmt":"2016-03-18T12:07:28","slug":"a-trail-of-abandoned-cars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2016\/03\/a-trail-of-abandoned-cars\/","title":{"rendered":"A Trail of Abandoned Cars"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"East<\/a>
East side of 9th St. Between Master & Jefferson Sts. July 12, 1954. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Cars<\/a>\u00a0transformed America\u2019s landscape and cityscape\u2014and hardly for the better. In 1925, a million vehicles jammed the nation’s junkyards. Before the decade was out, nearly three million cars a year were stopping in their tracks. \u201cA good number ended up working as stationary engines to run farm equipment,\u201d tells Tom McCarthy in Auto Mania<\/em>. Old cars ended up as landfill, pushed into abandoned quarries or into foundations for new buildings. Along the Mississippi River cars found an afterlife bulking up levees.<\/p>\n

\u201cWrecking and scrapping\u201d became big business. But abandoned cars soon hogged the majority of dump space. So, more and more often they were simply left where they stopped. Best guess: by the mid-1960s, the nation had 30,000,000 car carcasses littering the landscape. That\u2019s a 47-square-mile problem, big enough to blanket more than a third of the entire city of Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

Abandoned cars were thought to be “breeding places for rats and mosquitoes\u201d and, worse than eyesores, curbside wrecks \u201cprovided a prominent visual index” for the “deteriorating quality of urban life.”<\/p>\n

In Detroit, Motor City itself, the number of abandoned cars grew from 2,000 in 1964 to 13,000 two years later. New York\u2019s count quintupled between 1960 and 1963 and again between 1964 and 1969, growing to 70,000. By the late 1980s, New York’s population of abandoned cars would double. But then the New Yorkers successfully cracked down, heading into the Millennium with less than 10,000.<\/p>\n

Hmmm. If New York could do it, figured the campaigning candidate John Street as the mayoral election of 1999 approached, certainly Philadelphia could, too.<\/p>\n

Philadelphia’s own formidable backlog of abandoned cars also seemed countless, and bottomless. More than 12,500 had been hauled off the streets in 1985. Three years later, authorities towed twice that number. A decade later, 23,000 replacements sat curbside. What better a campaign promise than to rid the city of its most visible and most unwanted?<\/p>\n

\"Junk<\/a>
Junk Car and Trash. 2329 N. 10th St., July 12, 1954. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Through the Millennium Winter, Philadelphians counted curbside carcasses. Forty thousand. Though the target wasn\u2019t moving, it was expanding. Every week, citizens called in another thousand.<\/p>\n

Removing all the wrecks would be a Herculean effort, but Street was committed to “blight removal.” In addition to towing cars, he aimed “to raze dangerous houses and commercial buildings around town in a $250 million program” to be named the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative\u2014NTI. \u00a0And, as some liked to point out, it launched, in the Spring of 2000, a promise of “biblical\u201d proportions, a gigantic 40,000-car disappearing act that would last for 40 days.<\/p>\n

On the very first day 1,028 vehicles were hauled away from the streets of West and North Philadelphia. Authorities slapped large electric-green stickers onto “trashcars without vehicle identification numbers, those “valued at less than $500.” More than two dozen salvagers directing 127 tow-trucks targeted the stickered vehicles for immediate crushing. For every wreck removed and recycled, the city earned $25.<\/p>\n

The whole operation depended on a healthy market for scrap steel, something that had been missing for many decades.<\/p>\n

McCarthy writes: \u201cThe postwar scrap metal market peaked in 1956,\u201d when 41,000,000 tons of scrap were sold \u201cto domestic and foreign steel makers.\u201d Soon after that, the scrap market collapsed. Steelmakers modernized, replacing open-hearth furnaces that could work with a higher proportion of scrap metal. \u201cThe new basic oxygen furnaces used just 20-25 percent scrap. This change alone effectively halved the steel industry’s demand for scrap metal. \u2026 When steelmakers began substantially to reduce their overall demand for scrap, the market…practically vanished.\u201d<\/p>\n

And American cities found themselves awash in abandoned cars.<\/p>\n

Philadelphia salvagers sold their steel at the going rates, which plummeted from $80 to $55 a ton just before Mayor Street\u2019s campaign got underway. The value of a \u201ccrushed Chevy\u201d dropped by nearly a third.<\/p>\n

So. Was Philly\u2019s biblical-slash-millennial sweep the stuff of legend, or merely urban legend?<\/p>\n

Depends who\u2019s asking, who\u2019s talking and how they’re framing the facts. In 2002, Mayor Street spoke<\/a> of removing 100,000 cars. Before she left office, Councilwoman Marian Tasco reminisced<\/a> NTI\u2019s \u201cremoval of 224,886 abandoned cars.\u201d\u00a0Deborah Lynn Becher writes<\/a> of a more modest, but still impressive, 60,000 disappearing cars. But Haverford College political scientist Stephen J. McGovern claimed<\/a> the city towed 33,318 cars in forty days.<\/p>\n

Not quite 40K in 40 days. But in its modest asymmetry, moving, crushing and recycling 33,318 abandoned cars has the makings of a good tale\u2014and maybe even a believable one.<\/p>\n

[Sources include: Tom McCarthy, Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment<\/em> (Yale University Press, 2007); \u201cFighting the Abandoned Car Problem,\u201d by Bill Price, Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>, August 20, 1989; \u201cStreet Plans Sweep of 40,000 Junk Cars Starting Monday,\u201d by Cynthia Burton, Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>, March 29, 2000; \u201cAbandoned Car Crushes Man Trying To Tow It Away On The 2d Day of Phila.’s Cleanup,\u201d by Monica Yant and Maria Panaritis, Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>, April 5, 2000; \u201cWhat\u2019s Next For Street\u2019s Towing Plan,\u201d by Monica Yant, Philadelphia Inquirer,<\/em> April 25, 2000.]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cars\u00a0transformed America\u2019s landscape and cityscape\u2014and hardly for the better. In 1925, a million vehicles jammed the nation’s junkyards. Before the decade was out, nearly three million cars a year were stopping in their tracks. \u201cA good number ended up working as stationary engines to run farm equipment,\u201d tells Tom McCarthy in Auto Mania. Old cars […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10079\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}