A late uncle of mine became a huge Chrysler New Yorker fan after mustering out of the Army at the end of WWII. That’s the only car he would own from the late 40s until his passing about a dozen years ago.
The first thing he would do with any of those New Yorkers (new or used) was add curb feelers. They do work and we could hear him arrive due to the scraping on the curb.
Not too many years ago I saw a completed auction on eBay for a set of used curb feelers and those things got bid up to 60 bucks. Go figure.
I suppose that those old curb feelers did work–if you had your windows open and if your hearing was pretty good. Of course, being able to judge distances and clearances is better…
When I watch my old episodes of Naked City (I am currently in the early stages of season three), it is amazing to see how often actor Harry Belaver rode up and over curbs when veering his Pontiac Catalina patrol car to the side of the street. You would think that they would have re-shot those scenes, but…nope…he manages to jam his right side tire into the curb–and override it–approximately once out of every three tries. Maybe they should have given Harry a set of curb feelers for his Pontiac!
Curb feelers made the car look like it had bugs stuck underneath it, but they did work if you went slow, turned the radio off, and listened for them… which is how they were designed to be used. They were designed as and aid when parking next to granite curbs. Having torn a couple of sidewalls on granite curbs over the years, I can appreciate them… even though they still look stupid to me.
Curb feelers were very useful. Whitewalls got messed up easily if you scraped the curb a lot. Once whitewalls went out of fashion, so did the curb feelers. They also went out because more and more of us lived in suburbia, where stores had parking lots. Curb feelers are most useful for parallel parking. They tell you when you’re close enough.
The early nineties Civic was a beautiful car (we had a '94), so the tuner crowd has some taste. Though they ruin the good looks with all the add-ons. Maybe that’s why they like that specific car - it was very understated and didn’t even have a fancy grille (just plain air intakes below the bumper). As a blank canvas to add accessories to it was perfect.
Someone in our neighborhood has a red Civic EX of that generation exactly like ours. I still admire it. With as little as we drive we’d probably still have ours if it hadn’t been totalled by a hit-and-run driver a decade ago. That poor car kept getting run into. Rear-ended on freeway and pushed into truck ahead, backed into at a gas station island by a huge pickup, and finally the hit-and-run, at about 2:30AM, so odds are he was drunk. He gestured my partner to the curb, then took off. Nice. My partner was coming home from his shift at an HIV support line. He did manage to limp home (after talking to police) but the car was toast. Fixable, but too old to make sense. My partner considered taking the money and having it fixed, loving the car so much, but I talked him out of it.
Coincidentally saw a motorcycle today with longhorn steer horns somehow attached to the upper triple clamp. The tips were a good one foot past the ends of the handlebars.
I’d never made the connection beer tween grass nite curbs and curb feelers. San Francisco still has a lot of granite curbs, some with partial names and dates. San Francisco banned cemeteries from the city and required removal of existing bufials by the late forties. The cemeteries were overflowing, records were incomplete, and several had gone bankrupt so basic maintenance wasn’t performed and mudslides were uncovering coffins. The remains were moved to large cemeteries in either Oakland or Colma, a small suburb just to the south of SF that is almost entirely cemeteries. Many of the remains couldn’t be identified and were plaved in mass graves. To get back to cars…
Many of the granite tombstones that were no longer needed were taken to the city yard and pieces of them were used to patch granite curbs. San Francisco does one other thing I didn’t know is rare until a recent newspaper article. At almost every corner the names of the two streets are impressed in the wet concrete of the sidewalks. It’s a great convenience for pedestrians. The article was about errors and people who look for them. I’ve seen a few over the years, but mostly they’re accurate. I was in Chicago a few years ago and as a pedestrian was quite lost. Most streets were one-way and had signs only facing the traffic. If you were approaching on foot from the other way, too bad. Here we would have two-sided signs plus the sidewalks. In California, at any intersection there are signs for both streets. I’m always bugged in other states when they don’t have signs for the more important streets. We’re just supposed to know them, I guess. People grumble about driving here, but most of the highways and streets are well built and have excellent signage, if not quite as good as England’s.
They have all those terribly complicated double, even triple, roundabouts, but the signs make maneuvering them pretty easy. Excellent use of color coding, too, with signs for major destinations in blue and signs for smaller, local vullages on white signs.
In NH the current standard seems to be upright (rather than leaning) granite curbs on public roads. These can instantly rip a hole in a tire sidewall. I’ve lost a couple of tires over the years that way. The curb feelers are designed to prevent that from happening.
I also chewed up a rim on a granite curb on a busy in-town street once when I was trying to get out of the way of a cop car with its lights on and its siren screaming. It was not the cop’s fault, he was trying to save a life, and possibly risk his own to do so, I’m just describing the situation. But curb feelers would have been nice that day. If I lived in a city, I’'d probably have them.
It’s time for the accessory manufacturers to go modern on curb feelers. Instead of a piece of piano wire or a coil spring, we need electronic curb feelers that sound a chime or illuminate a warning lamp on the dashboard.
Well, the bumper genitalia always tops my list as the dumbest accessory, but that’s already been taken. I saw a pair hanging off of a Smart car the other day, though, meaning that someone has finally found a way to make the world’s dumbest accessory even dumber.
When I first went to Sioux Falls in 1966, their street markers in the older parts of town, were concrete pillars. Maybe 8" square and pointed at the top and maybe 4-5’ tall. I don’t remember if the street names were just painted on the surface or stamped but I think painted. Actually they weren’t too bad-right at eye level instead of looking up in the clouds for a sign. Kinda tough at night though.
