Metropolitan Museum (full episode)

[Music] [Music] hi I'm Lance now but thanks for tuning into the vintage vehicle show one of the things that's consistent about the show is that we are very inconsistent in the type of automobiles that we feature we have had everything from hulks rusting in to the ground in junkyards to amazing cars worth over 10 million dollars well we have a car today that is a bit unusual there are not that rare you've seen them around you love them like I do but they're a really fun car and that's what you're going to take a look at today Nash metropolitans also made by Hudson and we'll get into all those kind of details but the person that is going to give us really up to speed on Metropolitan's is Jimmy Valentine because we're here at Jimmy Valentines Metropolitan pit-stop Museum how you doing nice nice nice to talk to you yeah that's good to talk to you the Metropolitan is an unusual car even back in the 50s when told there were a lot of unusual cars out there how did such a car that's so small and and different than other cars at the time how did it come about fella by the name of George Mason who is the president of Nash decided to bring out a miniature car for basically housewives and college students to use as a second car possibly for those who who had big families and they could the housewives could use him to go pick up groceries or whatever they the concept was to come up with a car that would sell for about a thousand dollars and Mason explored the idea realized that that there would probably be a market for that and looked into the possibility of Nash making the car they found that it was going to be impossible for Nash to come up with a car that shared nothing with the other Nash products so to sell for $1000 would have been impossible it would probably have been a twenty six twenty seven hundred dollar car so he shopped the world to see if he could find any European companies that could make the car for them they all turned them down and eventually he ended up with BMC in England British motors corporation they said they could use they could build the car form using parts from existing part cars that they were already producing or had been producing I know a lot of people think that the motors are out of MGS or Austin Healey's but you were saying earlier to me that there it's a real combination of all kinds of parts right yes the drivetrain is basically Austin the engine was what they called the Austin in the in the second version of the metropolitan this is called the B engine which was used in the mg and many other cars the Austin taxi the Austin Jeep the engines were externally similar in appearance so that if you bought a metropolitan then you raise the hood and showed it to somebody he'd say or you have an mg engine in it that engine was basically used the same B engine was used well into the 70s by mg it was retired of course as far as the metropolitan management when they stopped making metropolitans in 1961 and these cars were actually manufactured in England and shipped here I mean parts were shipped there and then they was back here or how did that all come about the entire car was made in England and all of the parts on it were British were English and for the entire time that the car was manufactured which was eight years than the the whole thing as I say was made in England there was talk about bringing the dies over and manufacturing it in this country but they found that they could not use the dies in what became the American Motors plant so they would have had to completely redo the dies and that's when I decided to kill to kill the car the car for lack of a better term has a lot of the warm-and-fuzzy going I'm this is a cute little car I know there's some metropolitan owners out there that might not appreciate that description but these are a car you just you have to love them they you want to hug them so much they're so cute but when they first came out and they were going for that that housewife marker to the second car mark or the student market did some of the people go hey this is this is kind of a neat little almost a sporty car or is somewhat a sports car because the running gear in it or did it just stay with that original market that they were going for it pretty much stayed with with with the comfortable market rather than a sports car market it's always been a car that this artistically been accepted by people as being a it's a very rounded car you know the fenders are rounded the doors around it it has a very unique shape to it with with the fender wells not cut out the Beltline extending across the door that's this slightly dipped with the vertical lines that was a Nash design at the time and they kept that in most of their cars and just the overall look of the car has kept it very attractive especially to people that that have an artsy feel to them or they were they they they like something that's different now speaking of different you have something over here that I understand there are only two made of and and now there's only one that survives and it's right here so can you take a look at that yes what's going on [Music] Jimmy I have seen pictures of a metropolitan station wagon in magazines but I've never been in the same room as one how did this come about and how did you get it the factory decided that they would like to put out of a station wagon version of the Metropolitan and they contacted Pininfarina in Italy Ben and Farina had been designing the nash products for a number of years so they did not design the original metropolitan but they figured that they might get a little bit more flair in the design if they went to penetrator for the station wagon so they took two Metropolitan's and sent them from England to Italy to Pininfarina they came up with two different designs this design and one other one sent the finished cars then to the Kenosha Factory for the marketing department to look at the cars and assess the marketability of the car they looked at this one looked at the other one preferred to go with this one the director of styling dick Teague gave the other character of his wife she drove it for a very short period of time and lost control of it and crashed it and so they totaled that car this car remained but at that time the American Motors Company which was the outgrowth of Nash began to get pinched for money and decided that the best thing to do was to resurrect the 1955 Rambler station wagon and bring it out as the Rambler American station wagon in 1958 so this car was then shelved and was going to be crushed and one of the engineers at the time that would work at the company had heard about this and had seen it the engineer wanted to buy this car and it was a policy of American Motors never to sell a car that was a design car because by law they had to supply parts for the car so they were going to crush the car the engineer decided to try to go through the boys of George Romney who he was tutoring their grades had come up considerably and so he went through the boys to Romney and said I'd like to buy the car and Romney was very happy with the improvement that had come with the boys grades and so he said all right we will send you the car but you understand that we are not going to back the car up in any way and you be an engineer who works here you know that there's no way that we can back this up and he agreed and so he purchased the car drove it for a number of years in Detroit and then eventually put it in his garage with the idea restoring it and about that time I came along and purchased a car I bought it in Bloomfield Bloomfield Hills Michigan and drove it back here and it was quite an amazing trip considering it was done in December with snow on the ground and snow around and this car handled as well if not better than a stock metropolitan it's much more stable and the Jimi's museum is here in North Hollywood how was the reaction of people when you came driving along in this car in North Hollywood well I got a I got a crazy reaction on the road for one thing because when I was driving the highways of course the 18 wheelers would go by me and almost blow me off the road because I was playing it safe for the car and staying to about 45 miles an hour coming back so but as the drivers would go by they'd hang out the window you know and take a look at the car if they could Italy if they had a passionate or the passenger was always hanging out and giving me the thumbs up do you think their choice of not making this and going to the Rambler American and turning that into a station wagon was a good choice do you think this would have been a seller had they chosen to make this a wagon well virtually everybody that we've showed this to has said especially the Metropolitan owners they said they would have purchased one there's more room in it in the back there's room Fernan for two adults plus luggage or groceries they would have been happier probably to buy this and maybe one of the standard metropolises it's hard to say but but as I say I've never run into anybody that has seen this car that said gee I wish I would have liked one mm-hmm so it was it was a very short-sighted move on the on the part of the company to dump it yeah the carrying capacity on this is surprisingly large and equal to a lot of modern import cars as far as the capacity and speaking of cars with capacity you have one over here that that originally started as a fire engine but then it was turned into a kind of a people hauler car can we take a look at that yes Jimmy this car is red it has a beacon on the top it sure looks like a fire engine to me what's this all about this is a car that was used at the catskill game farm in upstate New York it was built for their kiddie rides as well as their volunteer fire department and of course they never used it in their volunteer fire department but they they had several of these the trailer was built by the the overland trailer company it's they started out making these with cause leaves and then switched into the Metropolitan's they used to put children on the back end of it where the benches are and they drive this around then in the game farm where they they have tamed llama and deer and a lot of domesticated animals and the animals would recognize the red fire truck coming through along with the yelling screaming children and they come up and the kids could lean over and feed them and they used this for a number of years we've had any number of customers that are coming here and have talked about gee they remember writing that's when they were a kid and it's really been been fun to talk to people about their rides on this eventually they had to discontinue this at the Catco game farm because of the legal reasons that that lawsuits were beginning to get more prevalent with with children and they were afraid that if a child fell out of this that they'd probably get sued and they didn't want the additional expense of a second rider on here to to have to supervise the children the car runs we are going to convert it to automatic transmission to use it in local parades Jimmy here at the metropolitan pit stop museum you have cars on display in your facility but I understand you also do restoration mechanical work supply parts for these cars we we have every part for the cars and we do minor restorations and major restorations full-blown restorations for either driving the cars or showing the cars all of the cars that are in here are stripped down and then have been bead blasted and then repainted and then it's a very complicated process to do it right and that's the way we try to do it here so that most of our cars that have been through here and that have been restored have won major awards we have a room full of trophies on the ones that we've done for for ourselves but then it at a point I stopped showing the cars because I felt it was unfair to and to really go out and compete against other people when we have a shop that can do them from the ground up and and do them where at well your ground-up restorations are fantastic and I see a car here that you did an exceptional job and let's take a look at that Jimmy the charm of metropolitans is really expressed in the convertibles I love though there's so much fun and also this particular one is a westerner I'd never heard of a westerner metropolitan in 1961 the metropolitan was pretty much destined to cease manufacturing but there there was still a question as to whether they might go on so they built for show cars out of the Metropolitan's to take to the different auto shows around the country the one that was used for the West Coast auto shows from Arizona to Washington all of the auto shows was this one called the Westerner and they painted it pearlescent silver I used special emblems here and in the back called the Westerner with a little cowgirl riding the pony and they used tuck-and-roll interior tuck-and-roll seats basically did a number on it that they thought would make it very appealing at the shows to see what the audience reaction would be to these show cars they tricked out the engine a little bit with some control in the engine this car when they finished with it taking it around for that year they sold it a private party drove it for about 90 thousand miles and then traded it back in I purchased the car it has not been restored we do plan on doing it but it it's a major job because again everything must be removed from the car and it'll have to be stripped what's happened is that they they used a lacquer paint on it and if you got in close you can see that there are a number of checks in the paint so there's no way we can go over this paint without actually having to strip it out but they used the other three show cars one was used in the Midwest and in the Florida area was called the Palm Beach there was one used for New York called the 5th Avenue which was painted a pink pearl pink and there was another one called the Cape Cod which was done in a in a pearl green that was used in the New England states so they had the for show cars running around for the appropriate parts of the country yes and you mentioned show cars I want everybody at home to take a seat if you're not already sit down because you're gonna see a metropolitan that is going to be the most amazing thing you have ever seen Jimmy I don't know you've know where to start with this this is George Jetson this this is an amazing looking vehicle what is the story behind this this is called the astronomical of 1955 the American Motors company knew that they were going to attend the 1956 International Auto Show in New York and they wanted to have a car there that would blow everybody away they decided to produce a very far-out looking car gave the project to the styling department the styling department turned it down and said we better go to an outside source for this we don't think that far ahead to to do things in a very futuristic style so an independent design engineer but the name of Richard Habib was chosen who had worked for American Motors before as well as Packard and General Motors he came up with the initial designs of the car got to go-ahead from the factory to produce it they in turn sent him a metropolitan and our Bibbs company then subcontracted to have this car manufactured for the show it took him about six months and they finished just in time to get it into the show it was featured on the cover of Newsweek in April of 1956 it was also used in a number of the American Motors Hudson and now and metropolitan showrooms for the draw for the for the public it is a driving car it will function as a metropolitan engine inside as well as the driving train there was a special clock built for the car by the Hamilton Watch Company it's a celestial clock with the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper and a number of other of the constellations in the face of the clock so that the clock goes counterclockwise the face of it whereas the hands go clockwise the name of the car was originally going to be called the Metro gnome GN ome and the International Harvester company in New York at that time was producing a Metro truck and their legal department contact at American Motors and said we own the rights to the name Metro you cannot use it so harbour went through a long checklist of other names to use and they finally decided on the name Astra gnome so the metropolitan name was essentially wiped away from the car even though it was a metropolitan and supposed to be the metropolitan of the future in probably the turn of the century when most of these bubble-top cars were supposed to be actually being sold to the public we're supposed to be driving them now right yeah somehow that didn't happen you know it was supposed to be we were supposed to have meting magnetic stripes on the road and be able to drive into that point and sell our cars up and say point and the car would go there that's never come about in the meantime there were a number of manufacturers back in the 50s who were building bubble-top cars not as far out as this one Ford had one and and the Chrysler was was another one that had one and none of them got quite as far out as this car yeah the Ford's later became the Batmobile so yes yeah the bubble-top on this can you show us how it operates yes it operates from inside the car as well as outside [Music] so you'd climb in the car and then reach inside and throw the switch and it would come back down yeah there's another joystick in the car you pull that and it will come back down again it comes down much quicker than it goes up you'll notice the the similarity and and how automotive designers borrow from one another in that the front end of this is very reminiscent of a 63 Buick Riviera and the rear end is very much like I believe 61 CAD tail fins and it's interesting to see how how designers will borrow from one another over the period of the years have you driven us down the street yes what kind of reaction she is quite fantastic the kids that are walking can't believe what they see and everybody points but it's it's much the same as you get when you drive a normal metropolitan - you get a lot of that reaction from people but again with thumbs up and and they'll come up to you and talk and say isn't that a cute car and my aunt had one or I wish I had one well the thumbs up you would get with this I think would be followed by somebody walking into a telephone pole because they were so sure what they were seeing yeah it was it was quite a design and and quite unique looks very much like a Jetsons car I've heard lots of rumors that it was used in in different space movies unfortunately it wasn't but it did get a lot of publicity back in the 50s in it that it was used for a lot of as I said dealer showroom promotions as well as as promotions for Alcoa aluminum because the whole body is aluminum so Alcoa used it for quite extensively and I'll be been designed some special luggage that would fit in here too and the luggage manufacturers were we're also using this to promote their luggage and well if the viewers want to see this car and all the other wonderful cause that you have here where is your museum located and when is it open we're in North Hollywood California were open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and we at the present time have the museum open by appointment we plan on opening it in the near future just to be a walk-in but at the present time we do it on appointment we have the price department here also and that is open the same time however the parks department being separate that's open of course Monday through Friday from 10:00 to 6:00 as well as our shop both of us look at the screen right now you can see some more specifics on where you can see this at and when you can see it Jimmy thank you very much for taking the time to be on the show today thank you and why don't you go ahead and we'll close out the segment while you close down the top all right [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: VV Productions

Views: 94,466

Keywords: Lance Lambert, The Vintage Vehicle Show, Metropolitan Museum, Metropolitan, Astra Gnome, Jimmy Valentine

Id: k_KeLPZAZhc

Length: 25min 27sec (1527 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 02 2016