By Justin Hyde

The Mystery of Flickr's Ghost Car Dealership

Somewhere in Ohio sits an abandoned Chrysler dealership with old cars parked on the showroom floor, like a prop leftover from a nuclear bomb test. The only evidence of its existence were a set of eerie Flickr photos. Until now.

Photographed by Sean Posey
The first photo of this abandoned dealership actually hit the Flickr photo sharing site in 2004. There's no name on the building or doors, just "Chrysler Plymouth Dodge Jeep" in a font that went out of style around the time Ronald Reagan became president. But the reason this dealership even hits our radar are the two Plymouth Fury sedans seen behind the bird-stained plate glass, tires sagging under rust.

Photographed by Scott Mulhollan
Flash forward six years later and the scene looks much the same, evoking the preservation through neglect that suffocates much of Detroit and Rust Belt America. The weeds block some photos and are shorn in others; clearly the building is still standing and occasionally maintained, but otherwise it's an automotive time capsule. But where is this located? What happened? How did two mighty Mopar classics get here — and why did nobody care enough to move them?

We decided, after stumbling across the photos in a random Flickr search a few months ago, to find out.

Photographed by Scott Mulhollan
The photographers report finding the ghost dealership in East Liverpool, Ohio, a little town on the Ohio River near Pennsylvania and West Virginia. It's history tracks the Middle American template: mid-century boom around a single industry, in this case pottery, peaking about 1970, followed by a steady decline. But the photos don't provide an address, a dealership name, nor any other information that could explain the scene.

The Mystery of Flickr's Ghost Car Dealership After some digging and a series of dead ends, Jalopnik dialed up a man named Basil Mangano. "Yeah, that's my building," he told us.

Mangano, 79, was a car dealer for nearly five decades, owning several stores around East Liverpool, before selling off his final store in 1998. When he closed up shop, he sold all of his buildings except this last one, the former Mark Motors, where he decided to stash the old cars he kept around. It's at this point that Mangano drops a real bomb on us.

While the '67 red Plymouth Fury and blue '75 Fury have the spots in front, they're not the only classics this old ghost dealership is hiding from the light of day. Mangano says the building and its annex — hidden from view in the Flickr photos - actually houses a treasure trove barn find of between 35 and 40 classic cars. He says the collection includes "a Chevrolet LUV, a (Dodge) Warlock and Red Express, just a bunch of shit...they're all over the board."

Mangano plans to close out for good soon, saying he found a buyer for the building and needs to unload the old cars. He's not on the Internet, and hasn't posted any ads or anything, so exactly how that process will work isn't clear.

We're hoping that however - if ever - Mangano happens to unload this dealership barn find of fairly epic proportions, he'll allow us to document the process. But when that happens is just as unclear as the how.

"I'm getting old and feeble," says Mangano, who sounded anything but on the phone. "Even my goddamn doctor says I look good, that son of a bitch."

Photo Credit: Randy Fox (Top)