It’s Wayback Wednesday, sponsored by Jamie Lockwood, broker/owner of Sutton Group Muskoka Realty!
It’s interesting to look at photos of Huntsville’s Main Street and see how it’s changed through the decades. This one was taken in the 1960s. Check out the signs. Do you think large vertical signs like these would fly nowadays?
Huntsville’s Main Street looked like a pretty busy place in the 1960s. This photo was taken sometime between 1960 and 1965. There was a bowling alley on Main Street! What else do you see? Campbell’s Drugs, Peter’s Restuarant, a 1959 Buick (front end only far left), a 1960 Chevrolet ( blue vehicle in front of Drug store), a 1956 Pontiac (light vehicle behind the 1960 Chevrolet), 1957 Chevrolet( light blue, light top driving east), 1957 Chevrolet (blue far right). There was parking on both sides of the street, too! (Photo courtesy of Huntsville Public Library).
See more Wayback Wednesday photos here.
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Vern Vince: I think you nailed the focus of this picture; the cars. Downtown chock-a-block with North American iron.
The bypass was completed by then and the semi traffic through town was gone. I had a ’56 Monarch for a while and then a ’55 Buick, one pale blue-green and the other lemon-lime; two-tone. The colours were a big difference from todays cars, done up in their industrial bland; gray, tan, blue, black, 13 different shades of white!
Pretty much everything in the picture is NA built, foreign cars not really here yet. Mr. Stokoe (?) about the only guy we had to work on British. I doubt if there is a station wagon on that street, maybe a couple, whereas now if it’s NA, it’s all station wagons, just genetically modified station wagons and called SUVs.
And there is chrome, bumpers and such, metal bodies and frames. You could bump a car or tree and everything didn’t fall apart or off. There were lots of trees and stuff bumped from time to time. You could sit on the car: a couple people on the roof , some on the trunk and hood, have a beer, and not have to go straight to a body shop to have the dents removed.
There were ‘no-drafts’ that were great on warm days in the summer and could clear the smoke from a car if a friend sparked one up. Those mirrors were also the hang out of many a bathing suit after a day at Rotary (later Kinsmen, then Hutcheson) beach or an afternoon sunning at the Locks.
I believe Martha Briggs (hope that’s not wrong Martha) wrote that, when we were younger, in those 60’s, we could buy everything we needed on that Main Street.
That’s so true, and it’s also where we found ourselves and each other, In cars like those.
Back in the day.
Just like I remembered the Main Street my 55 chev could be park there somewhere