
A Ferrari 250 GT PF Coupe Was Hidden in a Hollywood Apartment for Decades - 6stringmerc
http://petrolicious.com/apartment-find-this-ferrari-250-gt-pf-coupe-was-hidden-in-hollywood-for-decades
======
Moto7451
Um, so this is a funny through the looking glass moment. My uncle is the man
who put this car in the apartment and I lived in that building for three
years.

I can corroborate 100% of this story.

My uncle, and that apartment, have a very interesting history. My grandfather
purchased the building as an investment but it turned into a sort of crash pad
for members of my family. My uncle ended up managing it after years of
rebuilding jet engines in the Navy as a mechanic. He could rebuild anything by
eyeballing a reference part, which was awesome when the ancient pluming
failed, but misery when the ancient window treatments failed (ugly as sin and
cheap/poor quality even for the 1960s).

One of the units was owned by a writer that used it as his personal library
for an elaborate book and magazine collection. He lived there after retiring
but prior to that would fly back and forth between LA and NY because it was
cheaper and easier than relocating them and the associated increase in storage
fees.

The apartment building is a block away from Hollywood Blvd and many of the
street performers/costume wearers lived in the adjacent buildings. I would
wake up and say hello to Captain Jack Sparrow and Spiderman on my way to
grabbing a cup of coffee. In the late 70s through early 90s it was extremely
sketchy and somewhat dangerous. I was a kid when they started cleaning it up
so I don't have first hand knowledge of it but the neighborhood certainly
still talks about it. The park that used to be next to the apartment was where
drug dealers and prostitutes would market their wares. Eventually they
bulldozed it and put in a fenced, well lit, park and daycare center as part of
the Hollywood Revitalization and Redevelopment program.

My uncle decided to retire so he sold the building, split the proceeds with my
aunt and grandmother, and moved out of Hollywood.

AMA!

Edit: Street View for those who want to walk the Neighborhood
[https://www.google.com/maps/@34.1031929,-118.335439,3a,75y,1...](https://www.google.com/maps/@34.1031929,-118.335439,3a,75y,163.35h,74.65t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sSfOBs7pomXddomgqD6Urjg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1)

~~~
reneherse
Awesome story! I was hoping that the original article would have included some
of your uncle's sketches of the parts he was replacing. Would you happen to
have any drawings of his you could share? He sounds like a tremendously
talented individual.

~~~
Moto7451
I don't unfortunately. I only got to see him in action when he was doing
building maintenance and when installing some hardwood flooring and never
thought I'd need to hold onto a sketch.

He's extremely old school (i.e. a cassette tape answering machine) so I
wouldn't be able to get a sample in any timely manner.

~~~
jacobush
But he's still with us! :-). You could please start documenting him? Ask him
if you can record your conversations or something? :)

------
jacquesm
A friend of mine loves classic army vehicles and bought a Willys to restore.

Since he had no garage and was about to start living in a newly built house he
moved the car to his house and figured out that by pulling a couple of very
long bolts he could remove the whole facade from his living room in one go.

So this he did, rolled the Jeep inside and proceded to work on it for the next
couple of years. His gf moved in with him and they had breakfast on the hood
and used it as furniture until the work was completed some spring morning in
the 90's.

My friend got a stepladder and started to work on removing the facade once
again. His neighbor, curious type, hangs over the hedge and asks him what he's
doing. My friend (his name is Rob), tells the neighbor that once every couple
of years you have to release the facade of your house to clean up behind it.
Neighbor says 'good idea' and proceeds to borrow step-ladder and tools to
remove facade from his house as well.

After a while of this Rob goes into the house, starts up the Jeep and drives
it out straight through the front garden and hedge, parks it in the street and
then replaces the facade of his house without so much as a word to the
astonished neighbor :)

------
slurple
"Anyway, if you look through the documentation, every time he wanted parts in
the ‘70s he would hand draw the part. For example, a light bulb or a brake
caliper, or whatever it might be. The sketches are so intricate they look like
a photograph. He’d make multiple copies of his sketches and mail them out,
asking shops if they had these parts."

I would love to see those!

~~~
nether
By "hand drawn" do they mean freehand, or drawn with manual pencil drafting
techniques? Because both are done by hand, and really most trained draftsmen
produced drawings of that quality (even lettering would look like it was
printed).

~~~
mbrookes
From the comment you're replying to: "The sketches are so intricate they look
like a photograph."

~~~
zachrose
I look at images of Apple products and can't tell if they're CG or meticulous
studio photography.

~~~
baq
see also ikea. they had their modellers take photography courses and their
photographers take 3d modelling classes IIRC. good luck telling renders from
photos in their catalogue.

~~~
mstade
I can confirm this. Source: IKEA communications, their marketing arm, was a
client of a company I used to work for. Not only were we given a lot of source
material, but we also got to tour IKEA HQ in Älmhult, Sweden, whenever we went
down there for meetings and the likes. It's really quite remarkable what
they've got down there. Several photo and movie studios, with essentially a
warehouse full of IKEA furniture from pretty much every era, in at least three
copies I think they said. The 3d department in contrast was unassuming – just
a few people (can't remember exact count, but I'd guess less than 20 at least)
in a room doing amazing work. We'd spend a bunch of time looking at pictures
playing "can you pick out what's rendered and what's not?" kind of thing.
(Side note: this was around the time IKEA decided to switch to Verdana from
their proprietary IKEA Sans font as well, and it was fun to get an inside
perspective on it.)

I very much enjoyed working with them – highly professional people that really
know what they're doing.

------
di
Here's the cover of the June 1960 Road & Track that's mentioned in the
article: [http://i.imgur.com/4PVHPvT.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/4PVHPvT.jpg)

~~~
dstryr
And here's one of how the the car might look fully restored in its current
color: [http://imgur.com/a/LSM5j](http://imgur.com/a/LSM5j)

~~~
Shivetya
and likely half a million to a million depending on how original it is

------
prawn
Another hidden car story from LA:

 _The True Story Of How A Ferrari Ended Up Buried In Someone 's Yard_ \-
[http://jalopnik.com/5872514/the-true-story-of-how-a-
ferrari-...](http://jalopnik.com/5872514/the-true-story-of-how-a-ferrari-
ended-up-buried-in-someones-yard)

------
dstryr
If you like finds like this that you can actually purchase, I'd highly
recommend checking out [http://bringatrailer.com/](http://bringatrailer.com/)

They have links to the eBay auctions or Craigslist ads where the cars are
being sold. It's not my site, I just enjoy browsing through.

~~~
beachstartup
this is great for active buyers and sellers but for just doing
research/wasting time, do you know how to see finished auctions? is that a pay
feature for dealers?

~~~
swimfar
The site used to be mostly craigslist-type ads with set prices so you could
see what kinds of cars you could buy for $X. I was disappointed (and stopped
going there) when they started having auctions for that reason. There are
plenty of sites where I can see interesting cars. If I'm not actually in the
market for buying a car it's not as interesting. But it's still a cool site
regardless.

~~~
joshu
The threads are pretty interesting reading.

Some friends and I ended up buying an older racecar off BaT, which has been
terrifying...

------
jlawer
First Owned by John von Neumann....

Now that is a find.

~~~
vzaliva
John von Neumann[1] you had in mind died 1957, while the car built was
finished in 1959. So I guess it is a different one.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann)

~~~
apricot
Even better, a car that belonged to John von Neumann's ghost.

~~~
jacobush
The ghost in the machine. I'll lead myself out, thank you.

------
butterfi
I lived in San Francisco's Western Addition in the late 80's, and the old man
who lived in the modest Victorian across the street from me passed away. The
estate settled and the house cleaners showed up. Two huge bins of hoarder
nonsense were hauled away before the tow truck showed up. I watched from my
window as they pulled a Pierce-Arrow Touring car from this garage that
couldn't possibly have fit it. It had been sitting on it's tires, but it was
all there, from hood ornament to leather trunk on the back. Amazing!

------
DrScump
It's a secure man who is comfortable storing his automotive catalogs in a
_Kotex_ box.

------
Sanddancer
There's all kinds of stuff entombed in cities, just waiting to be discovered.
First thing this reminded me of was the Original Spanish Kitchen [1], which
was a restaurant, also in LA, which closed one day in 1961 and spent the next
44 years frozen in time. The fixtures, utensils, coffee maker, everything
intact, waiting for an opening that never came. All sorts of caches created
when someone just couldn't do it anymore, or when plans fall apart.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Spanish_Kitchen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Spanish_Kitchen)

~~~
ilamont
I lived in Taipei in the 1990s, when they were doing a lot of underground
tunneling for the subway system. I remember one night a sinkhole opened up on
one of the major thoroughfares and a couple taxis and delivery trucks drove
in. They got the drivers out, and then just filled in the hole with the
vehicles still in there. I always thought that would make an interesting
archaeological dig a few hundred years in the future (or the next time they
need to dig up the roads)

------
sgarman
Dang, I really wanted to see this apartment hinge system in action. Maybe they
will have that in the film he references.

------
olalonde
> We’ll have to see what the market says.

Maybe I'm just not a car guy but this whole interview read like an ad.

~~~
enneff
For a car of that vintage and condition no advertising is necessary. Any
interested parties will find out about it one way or another.

------
donretag
"it'd been sitting and they hadn’t rented out the apartment for 30 years"

I do not care about cars, so all I can think about is the loss of space/rent
for 30 years. Granted, Hollywood was much much cheaper 30 years ago, but that
apartment would not be vacate long in today's real estate market.

~~~
spaceflunky
This is the "pack rat's conundrum" as I call it.

If we assume the average rent over the past 15 years (or 180 months) was
$1,300, then he would have grossed $234,000 in rent. Probably enough to buy
one already resorted within the last 10 years. And definitely enough to pay
someone to restore his own.

In other words, he could have just taken the car out 15 years ago, then used
the rent to either directly pay for the restoration or use the rent to finance
a loan for the restoration.

~~~
camhenlin
Even the least maintained, least rare (they're all VERY rare) Ferrari 250's
all go for well over $500,000, with many going for over $1,000,000. So
probably not.

See: [https://www.hemmings.com/classifieds/cars-for-
sale/ferrari/2...](https://www.hemmings.com/classifieds/cars-for-
sale/ferrari/250gt)

~~~
gwern
(Of course, he could also have sold the car back in the 1960s or something and
enjoyed 50 years of compounding mutual fund or index returns.)

~~~
jacobush
Or booze

~~~
gwern
If he has the discipline & future-orientation to wall up and maintain with
custom parts a Ferrari for decades on end, I think he is probably not the kind
of guy who would've sold it and immediately blown it all on booze.

~~~
jacobush
Maybe, maybe not. There is something potentially obsessive about walling up
and maintain a Ferrari like that. :)

------
packetized
I have nothing to contribute except that, as a person that generally works
with computer systems and writes a bit of software, I can totally imagine
someone undertaking this kind of project, and cannot believe that it started
with a Ferrari chassis/Pininfarina coach nearly sixty years ago. Jawdroppingly
amazed.

------
ChuckMcM
These are always great stories. I loved the barn full of classic cars one from
a few years ago as well. ([http://curioustype.com/35-million-dollar-car-
collection-foun...](http://curioustype.com/35-million-dollar-car-collection-
found-abondoned-barn.htm))

~~~
codezero
Whoa, turns out the story behind the barn find is a myth!

[http://www.autoblog.com/2007/07/31/portuguese-barn-find-
hoax...](http://www.autoblog.com/2007/07/31/portuguese-barn-find-hoax-still-
going-strong/)

[http://www.snopes.com/photos/automobiles/barnfind.asp](http://www.snopes.com/photos/automobiles/barnfind.asp)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Dang, it was such a nice story too.

------
theluketaylor
If you are not a car person and have always wondered what all the fuss is
about watch some of the petrolicious youtube videos. They always have really
interesting interviews with the owner about what their car means to them. The
fact it's all meticulously filmed makes for fascinating viewing.

------
gregmac
Was this being worked on in the apartment? One of the pictures shows the right
side is only a couple inches away from the wall, but it's on jack stands. How
did that happen?

~~~
codezero
The owner owned the apartment building and added an entirely hinged wall to
the unit, and rolled the car in with a ramp, then closed it up!

------
rurban
Street value around 2.5M. Obviously the new owner didn't want to talk about
it.

------
gambiting
This is literally a Forza Horizon 3 "barn find" type of situation :D

------
ams6110
If the lawyer was really working in his client's interest he'd have put the
car up for auction instead of buying it himself.

------
Jeaye
So, it was couped up in that apartment for a long time...

~~~
throwanem
I do not hate fun, yet downvoted your pun; I agree that that's sad, but the
pun is _so bad!_ It's such a poor line that the sign seemed condign - of the
delta it gives to your karma, that is.

My doggerel here merits no more excuse, but remains with intent that you feel
no misuse; the lesson, I hope, you will find salutary, when next you should
chance on the urge to make merry.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _condign_

Thank you for teaching me a new word.

~~~
jacobush
Thank you for not letting me assume it was a typo.

~~~
throwanem
Nice thing about verses, unless they're the worst, is the scan and the rhyme
can in parsing save time; when a word fits the scheme, though unlikely it
seem, it's been chosen with care for the meaning that's there.

(What did you think it was a typo _for_?)

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _Nice thing about verses, unless they 're the worst, is the scan and the
> rhyme can in parsing save time;_

I remember someone mentioning that in the oral tradition - pre-literate stuff
- rhyming was a sort of checksum to make sure that your story didn't drift too
much with retellings.

~~~
jacobush
A very good checksum. Even if the listener might not always be able to recite
a saga or poem, she would likely be pretty able to detect a deviation from the
standard telling.

I think the rhyming did not exactly prevent changes, but made patches obvious.
Kinda like git and source control. :)

Oral tradition has been proven to be extremely stable under the right
circumstances. Australia has tales about ancestral hunting grounds which have
been lost to the sea for millennia.

[https://www.sott.net/article/291976-Australian-aboriginal-
st...](https://www.sott.net/article/291976-Australian-aboriginal-stories-of-
ancient-sea-level-rise-have-survived-for-10000-years)

