Motoring through Westwood, 1912

BY KRISTIN BEUSCHER SPECIAL TO PASCACK PRESS WESTWOOD

WESTWOOD AVENUEHAD a much different look when this postcard above was mailed, June 10, 1912.

The viewer was looking up Main Street from Railroad Avenue. Nowadays, using the modern names, we would say it is looking up Westwood Avenue from Broadway.

This was an era when automobiles were still relatively new on the scene, and the treelined avenue saw traffic from both tires and horsesʼ hooves.

Cars were an expensive luxury back then. A classified advertisement from June 1912 shows a man from Westwood trying to sell a Rambler Touring Car he had bought less than a year earlier. He states in the ad that he paid $2,800 for the car. Adjusting for inflation, thatʼs $90,000 in todayʼs money.

On the left side of the street we see an early auto along with a horse-drawn wagon parked a couple doors down. There were posts along the curb line for hitching horses, but it would be many years before parking spaces for cars were drawn on the road.

The worldʼs first parking meter was installed in Oklahoma City in 1935; a decade later these devices made their appearance in Westwood. When the borough installed its first parking meters in the downtown area in the 1940s, an hour of parking cost a nickel.

The coming of the railroad in 1870 had triggered a massive transformation in the four-cylinder engine on a 125-inchwheelbase chassis, sold at an impressive cost of $3,050. A luxuriously appointed beast in Dark Brewster Green, it was a true king of the road that could challenge what were then the top models of Pierce and Packard in horsepower and scale.”

This 1911 Rambler Model 65 sevenpassenger touring car sold at a Sotheby’s auction in 2019 for $266,750. It was listed as the only surviving Model 65.

The catalog read in part that the Rambler “was a high-quality, uppermid-priced automobile, of which numerous iterations were produced between 1902 and 1916. None of the Brass Era Ramblers were more scenestealing than the Model 65, a large model of 1911 with a 45 hp, 431 cu. in.