A Ferrari 250 GT PF Coupe Was Hidden in a Hollywood Apartment for Decades | Hacker News Reader

A Ferrari 250 GT PF Coupe Was Hidden in a Hollywood Apartment for Decades

petrolicious.com

281 points6stringmerc92 comments

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...

HN is amazing.

The internet is amazing.

The world is amazing

You are amazing.

Please stop.

Obligatory XKCD-ish reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHoDsZDMH_Y

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.

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.

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

Since he was a draftsman I bet they'd look something like this: http://www.ardigitech.com/images/mech2.jpg. No point in making them look like actual photos, with shading, when you could just take an actual photograph instead.

Hi there, I'm the gear-head and story lover who spotted this and felt it might touch a nerve with this audience.

I'd like to ask you, as a real participant in your Uncle's world, if you'd be interested in turning such an experience into a "poetic license" type historical screenplay. As a Dallas resident who has seen a few ups-n-downs with Deep Ellum, I think what you describe could be really compelling not just from the "car in an apartment" storyline but for the people who inhabited that sphere. Just a thought, thanks for chiming in by the way, was great to read!

Edit: Forgot to add my Dad's family was up 'n down California for a long time and I had some fun hanging out in Malibu with a Tio who was a Hollywood stunt man for many years. History is quite a trip.

Former Deep Ellum resident here (by way of southern CA) and I have to say thanks for submitting this, it's an interesting story!

Perhaps you already know this but Musso & Frank's is right around the corner from the 'Ferrari apartment' and is often mentioned in crime novelist Michael Connelly's stories. It's a favorite of a main character. If you enjoy reading about the history of this part of California, plus some unsavory and colorful characters, you should check out his books. 'Angel's Flight' is a particularly good earlier work by him. The book series is what Amazon's 'Bosch' series is based on as well.

von Neumann died in 1957. Was he really first registered owner?

Different Von Neumann. Commenters below linked to a bio.

Ah! thank you. I was going to yell: "THE J.V.N.!" wow! I read somewhere that he (the math/cs JVN) had a lead foot, the Ferrari makes sense. Still good/strange story.

Fucking awesome. Agree with others that more pictures would be very welcome, particularly the hinged wall and ramps setup. Crazy stuff.

So how come your Uncle never took the Car out again? Surely if restored it's worth a fortune.

Probably not. This is not one of the more desirable 250 variants (Which is not to say it isn't valuable - well restored it's probably about a $750,000 car), but it's not one of the insanely valuable ones (The Spiders and Berlinettas have sold for north of $10M).

His interests changed. At some point he enjoying working on model trains and gardening more than cars.

My uncle is not particularly motivated by money or business ventures. He's lived a fairly quiet and private life and trying to restore and flip this car isn't really in his makeup.

> My uncle is the man who put this car in the apartment and I lived in that building for three year

As in your uncle owned the car?

Anyway, what an excellent story and made all the more interesting by your comment.

Yes. Sorry if I wasn't clear :).

Appreciated.

This is awesome! I'd love to do a story on it if possible. Can we connect and chat. I work at CBS. Thanks, Craig

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 :)

"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!

Hear hear! And I think if you made prints of them, there'd be a demand!

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).

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

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

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.

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.

Drafting techniques. My uncle was trained in drafting and blueprinting.

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

such a beautiful car for it's time. it's still good looking. some cars are classic for a reason, their design stands the test of time.

Yep, another beautiful design by Pininfarina

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

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

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-...

If you like finds like this that you can actually purchase, I'd highly recommend checking out 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.

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?

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.

The threads are pretty interesting reading.

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

On the auction page you can just hit "View Older" at the bottom as many times as you'd like. The Search option at the top lets you find all their old auctions. One thing I really like about bring a trailer is they keep the bid history available so you can get a much better feel for real market value compared to some like looking up blue book.

First Owned by John von Neumann....

Now that is a find.

Ha, yeah. I was about to say that is the coolest thing about the car. And it is already a cool car.

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

At least it's not Jon Voight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm2iNNqj2fQ

John Voight

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

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

TIL Ferrari 250 was actually tachikoma.

Wow, apparently this other John von Neumann [0] achieved a certain fame in the racing world, and was a Ferrari distributor in California in the 50s.

[0]: http://www.september8th.com/news_neumann1.htm

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!

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

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

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)

French apartment untouched for 70 years http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2323297/Inside-Paris...

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

> 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.

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

"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.

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.

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...

(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.)

Or booze

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.

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

The thing is, there are car enthusiasts who would much much rather do all the work themselves since they know that that's the only way they guarantee that everything turns out "right" without any corner cutting.

My precious

You pretty much hit the nail on the head.

When I lived at this apartment two years ago I did not pay anywhere near market rent. The building was run more as a hobby than a business to be completely honest. So long as the bills were paid and the family members that lived off the income were taken care of, the rent didn't change.

This was a huge matter of contention for my family.

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.

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...)

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.snopes.com/photos/automobiles/barnfind.asp

Dang, it was such a nice story too.

If you like that kind of stories you should look up Hagertys "Barn find hunter" on Youtube.

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.

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?

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!

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

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

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.

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

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.

> condign

Thank you for teaching me a new word.

You're welcome!

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

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?)

> 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.

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...

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