Wild in the Streets

Racing was nuts, illegal as a three-buck pistol, and all over the New York area

Wild in the Streets
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Feature Article from Hemmings Muscle Machines

July, 2007 - Jim Donnelly

You have to start out by agreeing that on some kind of level, anyway, the auto manufacturers viewed it all as directed synergy. It was the 1960s. The economy was on a charge. Everybody who wanted a job, had one. There was money. Young people had it and they wanted to spend it. They wanted to go fast and they bought cars that roared. Car companies were wise to this so they built alliances with magazines that young car guys gobbled up. There were open highways and brawny cars.

All of these forces converged and metastasized, for a few crack-brained years, in and around New York City. All that bragging about Detroit or L.A. being the epicenters of muscle cars, flush it, grab a plunger if you've got to. When it really counted, New York was where high-performance cars commanded all they encountered, on the track, and a lot more frequently, on the street.

It was all too vast for him to grasp when it was happening, but a lot of this orbit revolved around a fairly conventional New Yorker named Joe Oldham, who grew up in the tungsten-tough East New York section of Brooklyn, where getting places rapidly usually involved elevated trains. An aspiring rock drummer, Oldham (and a surprising number of his neighbors) was drilled by hot cars right from his Ring Ding years. After wandering through some journalism courses at New York University, he was a walk-on at Magnum-Royal Publications in Manhattan, which produced a couple of brassy magazines, including Cars, under the tutelage of a couple of irreverent editors named Fred Mackerodt and Marty Schorr. They were East Coast guys who were hard-wired into the muscle scene that was rocking the firmament of the city's outer boroughs and Long Island. Back then, most of it happened on the street. Why pay tolls and drive hours to a legit strip at Englishtown or Center Moriches when there was a broad, empty boulevard 10 minutes away, with scant traffic after midnight and even fewer cops?

Not completely by plan, Oldham became a pivotal figure in the world of yesterday's hoons in and around New York. The car manufacturers kept fleets--fleets--of GTOs, Hemis, R-codes and everything imaginable in Manhattan garages. Oldham needed only to make a phone call, or just show up outside, to obtain the keys. Then it was off to an out-of-the-way street someplace, way after dark, where young people would flock, jeans stuffed with wagering cash, where Oldham would show up to race on the street in a brand-new car registered to one of the Big Three. Then go back to Manhattan and write about it. It was crazy and it obviously couldn't last. In 1968, his photo essay on New York street racing was printed in Cars, and created a scandal. Wally Parks called Oldham from Los Angeles to denounce him personally.

That era of madness is recreated here, in photos excerpted from the tell-all story of his Sixties career as an automotive journalist, in Muscle Car Confidential, just published by Motorbooks (www.motorbooks.com). Oldham reformed himself and eventually rose to editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics before retiring to Palm Springs, California. Today, he's sanguine about the wildness his wordcraft stoked, relaxing in his role as an agent of history. As he put it, "What do you think? Of course the manufacturers knew what we were doing. They knew exactly what we doing with those cars. That's exactly, specifically, why they gave them to me. Yes, I street-raced them. Constantly. Back then, I had driver's licenses from three states. I still have about 100 tickets left that I kept as souvenirs."

I took this photo on the service road alongside the Southern State Parkway on Long Island, in Suffolk County. The racers used to gather at night at the McDonald's on Route 110 in Huntington, then they'd get onto the service road, which ran on either side of the Southern State, just east of Route 110, so you were racing in the same direction as if you'd be heading back to Brooklyn or Queens. After the story first ran in Cars in 1968, I got a call at the editorial offices from some guy on the island who said the racing on the Clearview and Cross Bay was dog doo, and how we ought to come out there and see where they raced. Here, you've got one of the SS 396s that were all over the place back then, just launching against a 1964 Pontiac Grand Prix. The beautiful thing here was, the Suffolk County police never bothered us, as long as we didn't get off the service road and onto the lanes of the Southern State or do something stupid like run into the guardrails on the service road or something.

On Cross Bay Boulevard, the pits were two open areas almost directly before the first of the bridges that crossed Jamaica Bay. They were parking areas for people who were fishing or crabbing off the bridges, but late at night, the racers took them over. This was in late 1968, right after the 1969 new cars had been introduced, and this was the very first 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge ever built. The very first two cars off the line went to the Pontiac press fleets, one for the East Coast, one for the West Coast, and I took the East Coast one right from the press garage to Cross Bay to race it. It was in Carousel Red, with the body stripes, and nobody had ever seen anything like it before. It had the rear spoiler, and the guys on the street were calling it a salami slicer. Back then, a car like the Judge was considered outrageous.

There were these two drive-ins, Pizza City and the Big Bow Wow, on Cross Bay Boulevard in Queens that were both really popular hangouts for the street racers. They were almost side by side, maybe 100 yards apart. There are two bridges that go over Jamaica Bay as you head south through Queens toward Rockaway, and both these places were right before you got to the first bridge. Cross Bay Boulevard was the first really popular place in New York City to go street racing. It's built up solid today all the way down to the beach with houses and shopping centers and what have you, but back then, there was nothing but marshes and little inlets from the bay. There was so much racing out there back then that after the 1960s, the police finally showed up in droves and shut it down..

Here is a Chevelle launching on the Southern State service road on Long Island in late 1968. You never knew back then what you'd be running into, engine- or modification-wise, when you raced somebody on the street. Most everybody had loud mufflers back then, first of all, and nobody would ever tell you what they really had in the car. You'd walk up to somebody, ask him what he had, and he'd just say, 'a V-8,' something like that. Unless it was a brand-new muscle car that was straight from the dealership, you never knew for sure. Again, this was all going on at about 2 or 3 in the morning, and I'd say maybe 100 to 120 cars had showed up. I don't know if that was the normal turnout, or if it was an aberration just because all these guys knew we were going to show up from the magazine.

What used to happen was, in this particular area of Queens, guys would run on the Clearview Expressway, and the guys who were going to race there would have their pits, you would call it, on both sides of Union Turnpike under an overpass for the Clearview. Guys would gather under the overpass, or right next to it, and they'd stage up, or just choose up for races they were going to have later that night up above on the expressway itself. As I remember it, that 1964 Plymouth that's lined up against the 1966 Chevelle SS 396 was a 426 Wedge car, a Stage 3 car, that used to show up around there pretty often. This shot is taking place on Union Turnpike, but there were no real runs there. Guys would line up there just to psych out and provoke one another, ask each other if they wanted to run for $50 or so, that sort of thing. The real action, the actual racing, would be taking place up on the expressway.

This photo was taken in 1968 as part of the original article that ran in Cars. It was on Union Turnpike in Queens, and the sign up at the top of the picture points toward the Throgs Neck Bridge on the northbound Clearview Expressway. You'd follow along on Union Turnpike here if you wanted to cross over into Brooklyn. This is taking place about 2 in the morning and the police have just shown up, and they were handing out tickets left and right. They would write you for everything they could, just trying to get the racers to pick up and leave or at least, move someplace else. You'd get a ticket for a safety violation, for loitering, a broken taillamp, anything they could get you on. I remember that when the cops started really cracking down on the racing along Cross Bay Boulevard, they had about 20 police cars show up at once one night, and they probably had one car every 100 yards or so along the street, just waiting to write people up.

I couldn't believe this when I first saw it, either. Guys in street racing were getting semi-organized, to the point where they were actually having these fliers printed up to advertise upcoming quote, major meets, unquote. The one on the left is advertising one that was set for the Connecting Highway, a really short section of expressway in Queens that ran between the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Grand Central Parkway. Guys would say, 'You running the Connecting tonight?' and, 'Yeah, I'll be there.' The best things about the Connecting were, it was just about a quarter-mile long, and there were elevated areas along the service road where you could sit there and watch the action, just like at a drag strip. The other handout is announcing a race along the West Shore Expressway in Staten Island, off Interstate 278 near the Bayonne and Goethals bridges to New Jersey. They hand these out at all the drive-ins where the racers hung out, from Brooklyn Heights all the way out on Long Island, and tack them up on poles on roads where the street racers ran, like the Connecting Highway. Unbelievable.


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