By Kate KinaneThe smells of grilled hamburgers, gasoline and burnt rubber waft through the air at the weekly Tuesday night car show on Bald Hill. Vinny Micucci, a retiree from Smithtown, breathes it all in, reminiscing in a lawn chair beside his spotless black 1971 Oldsmobile 442. A regular at the weekly gathering, sponsored by the Farmingville Fire Department, he arrives early for a front row seat near the parking lot’s entrance where the parade of hot rods rolls in.The scene at Oyster Bay Cruise Night.
“It really makes me feel like a teenager again,” says Micucci with a big, excited smile. He has loved muscle cars since the good old days, but could not afford one back then.
“I put it off for 35, 40 years,” says Micucci, “until it got to the point where the house was paid off, the kids went to college and it was me and my wife looking at each other and I said, ‘Maybe I’m going to get myself a new car.’” Micucci began shopping around at car shows, searching for treasure. He eventually fulfilled his childhood dream when he bought the top-of-the-line W-30 edition—according to Micucci, of the 1,010 that were made, there are only three on Long Island. “It was just such an unbelievably beautiful car for the time,” he says, boasting a handful of trophies that the car has won at some judged car shows.
Such talk revs up any given summer week—and through fall and spring, barring bad weather—when like-minded gearheads line up their sweet rides and swap stories at more than a dozen cruise-ins, cruise-nights and organized car shows across the Island, most of which typically draw 300-plus cars. Although the welcome at these meeting grounds is sometimes worn thin by the disobedience of a few rowdy speed demons, the mostly well-behaved car lovers and their families work hard to maintain the places where they have gathered for years.John McAleavey, who drives "The Kennedy Car," keeps extra mini-American flags in the back seat, just in case.
These hang-outs are populated by a range of rare models: everything from 20-horsepower 1908 Ford Model Ts to 2010 Mustang GTs sporting a beefy 315 horses; everything from dead-quiet engines to deep growls roaring from beneath hoods. American classics with no radios are parked next to $10,000 bass-booming, arrhythmia-causing sound systems in the neon-lit trunks of late-model foreign cars. It’s part swap meet, part cross section, as old-timers who rebuilt their cars themselves mingle with teens and 20-somethings tinkering with their first sports car. Big burly lumberjack types park next to soccer moms who traded their minivans for hot rods. There are the ’57 Chevy greaser rockabilly revivalists and souped-up Scion-driving Fast and the Furious wannabes. Harley riders line up their hogs next to Suzuki owners. The common denominator, beyond a shared love of the internal combustion engine, is that these gatherings mean a low-cost night out and escape from a lingering recession—an escape, frankly, from a dreary real world where cars and parking lots are just reminders of responsibilities and stress.
to all of the shows on cable, Pimp My Ride, things like that.” Arrons points to the 17- to 30-year-old demographic that he credits with helping to bring back LI’s car subculture.These days, about 75 percent of the cruise-ins on LI are free and those that do charge only cost $3 to $5 for admission, according to Pete Giordano, founder of www.LIClassicCars.com, a local car show listing website. For many, the biggest expense is the car’s upkeep, the gas to get there and the ice cream for the ride home.”]
Four on the Floor
Growing pains are common for car shows that are still trying to gain traction. Burnouts, loud music, speeding and unregistered vehicles are among the issues often found—not to mention public urination and open alcohol container violations.
“It really happens wherever you go,” says Marty Himes, who is arguably LI’s biggest car fanatic. Himes started the Town of Islip Saturday Night Cruise-In, the most recent addition to the Island’s cruise-in circuit. He also runs the Himes Museum of Racing Nostalgia, a shrine to LI’s racing heritage, out of his Bay Shore home, and chronicles LI’s auto racers of yesteryear for a local newspaper, the Great South Bay Magazine.
“Most guys have good heads on their shoulders,” he says. “Some get big heads; that’s when they get into trouble.” In the end, “it only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch,” he says through beaming blue eyes that belie a long-ago teenage defiance that remains after decades of hard work. That’s why Himes is trying to combat the perception that these gatherings are a detriment to the community by creating a set of rules that put town officials at ease.“We needed a place to shoot the breeze, talk memories, and have some fun,” says Himes. “We wanted to make it safe, turn it into a family outing. If we get thrown out of this place, it won’t be through any of our doing.”It wouldn’t be the first time the well-intentioned group had the cops called on them.
“Dozens, literally dozens of cruise nights have come and gone over the years, and the main reason they have gone is not for lack of interest, but people misbehaving,” says Giordano, with exasperation in his voice. “It’s like, come on guys, you have to behave out there. You fight like crazy to get these spots and you jump through hoops, then a few guys put everybody in danger and then you get booted.”
But it isn’t always reckless drivers and showoffs that ruin a car show. It can also be poor planning.
“Some nights you can have six cruise nights and there are only so many people heading out, so you end up with these watered-down places,” says Giordano. “The other part is that a lot of times people start up cruise nights without the permission of the landlords,” he adds, referring to the countless cruise nights that have popped up in parking lots and then vanished before they could become established.Yet like the standard fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror, some cruise-ins have stood the test of time. The weekly Wednesday night car show at Nathan’s Famous in Oceanside is the oldest on the Island, running continuously since the 1970s, and has been a staple for local car junkies for generations, according to Giordano. Although it started out as more of a motorcycle get-together, it is now a family-oriented classic car cruise-in.For those car shows that go off without a hitch, the success often is a nitro boost to the community’s businesses. For instance, business rockets on Wednesday nights at Nathan’s.
“It’s a really fun atmosphere, a lot of families, not really any troublemakers,” says Yoselin Pena, a manager at the Oceanside Nathan’s—a historic hot dog stand in its own rite, as the first outside of Coney Island.
Suffolk’s car heads have their choice of shows as well. On Thursday evenings in Oakdale, at Oakdale Lighthouse Center shopping center on Montauk Highway, area shopkeepers also report a spike in business when the hot rods roll in, according to Ron Beattie, president of the Oakdale Chamber of Commerce. Bob Eckna, owner of Big Bottom Bikes in Oakdale, says he sells much more hot rod-related apparel on those nights.
Red, White and Cruisin’
“My car is this country,” says Syosset’s John McAleavey, while playing “God Bless America” on a boombox set up on the trunk of his 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible—the same car President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in—at Cruise Night in Oyster Bay on a recent Tuesday evening. “It is a piece of everyone here.”“I want to share America with people,” adds the 60-year-old auto body shop owner. And share he does. McAleavey drives his car into Manhattan each December while wearing a Santa Claus suit to hand out toys to children. He’s even been asked to lead local parades with the iconic car, complete with the infamous suicide doors (because they swing in the opposite direction of conventional doors, which can be problematic for a number of reasons). “I love what this car represents,” he says.The last yellow cab on the road: Howard Brooksteins stands next to his '52 Chevy.
At any good LI cruise-in, cars are grouped by make or model, but once space gets scarce, disparate models start getting scattered around the parking lots in haphazard fashion. Mustangs and Corvettes seem to dominate, although the variety can be nearly endless. Rows upon rows of Chevys, Fords, Dodges and Pontiacs—among so many others—sit parked, shiny as the day they rolled off the showroom floor, while their owners mill around the parking lot happily chatting about memories, “mint” paint jobs, and share tips on how best to clean their motors.
The Shelby of buggies: John Marcinka prepares his Meyers Manks Dune Buggy.
All of this pro-car talk goes off without a hint of irony on an island where traffic is a daily crisis. Despite the fact that having a car is a necessity on Long Island—thanks to the suburban planners who laid the Island’s highways—for these enthusiasts, sitting in a parked car is preferable to pretty much anything. Then again, these are people who think of their car as more than a utilitarian box on wheels that gets one “from point A to point B,” a phrase that tends to make car-show participants cringe.
“Everyone has heard that phrase innumerable times, but it’s only truly painful to those who spend hours and hours bent over a hood, lying underneath cars, painstakingly pressing on decals in a perfectly straight line, and inhaling toxic fumes in a paint booth,” says Richie Jones of Precise Auto Collision in Ronkonkoma. “Car enthusiasts spend years restoring their cars to their original splendor, or [putting] a new, wild spin on what they were meant to look like. Gear heads are aesthetically drawn to cars, the cleanliness, the shine of the paint, the gleam off of aluminum heads under the hood and the whole package. When the ‘point A, point B’ phrase is spoken, it takes away from whatever time and effort car lovers dedicate to their automobiles.”
There are immense costs when it comes to restoring or customizing a car. From floorboards to interior lining, from paint to vinyl seats, from bumper to bumper, everything—absolutely everything—about restoring a car is expensive. Even for those who do the work themselves, it can be costly, but the motivation is fierce.“It’s really no different than a dog in a dog show,” says Arrons, pointing to the pride drivers feel after their car is finished and—at last—admired by strangers. That’s why these gatherings have become so popular: because LI is full of people with cars, so it’s only natural that some of those people will want their cars to stand out, to be better, cooler, more authentic, more beautiful. They want to show off. They want their vehicles to be in the public eye, to be admired. And not just in the summer, but all year round—assuming it’s not snowing, or raining, or…doing anything, really, that might damage a mint paint job.Coleman, at the Bellmore car show, puts it more succinctly: “As long as it’s not too cold to stand outside next to our cars, we’ll be here.”With additional reporting by Timothy BolgerMust-See Car Shows There’s a car show for almost every day of the week on LI, so break out the wax, shine up your chrome and get there early for a good parking spot.TuesdaysAudrey Avenue, Oyster Bay, 5-10 p.m.Bald Hill, Farmingville, 5 p.m.Tri-County Flea Market, Levittown, 6 p.m.
Wednesdays
Nathan’s Famous, Oceanside, 6 p.m.
Thursdays
Wendy’s Shopping Center, Montauk Highway, Oakdale, 6 p.m.
Villa Monaco’s, Montauk Highway, West Islip, 6 p.m.
Bridge and School Streets, Glen Cove, 5 p.m.
Fridays
Bellmore LIRR, 5 p.m.
Massapequa LIRR, 7 p.m.
Saturdays
Cedar Beach, Ocean Parkway, 6 p.m.
Home Depot Shopping Center, Commack, 5 p.m.
Sundays
Oak Beach, Ocean Parkway, 7 a.m.
Bob’s Shopping Center, Sunrise Highway, West Islip, 8 a.m.
