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'It's Peter Max's Car, Man!

How one artist’s big PR dream left 36 Corvettes in the dust in
Brooklyn basement.

By Josh Dea

(Photo Credit: David Allee)

There are 36 vintage Corvettes in the garage below the former Dail
News printing plant in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. They’re dusty, an
secure behind a chain-link fence, as if being held as evidence: on
Corvette for each year they were made, starting with a pearl-whit
’53 convertible and ending with a red 1989 model. Some of thei
windows are open. Some have flat tires. A lone white ’61 rest
outside the fence. On its back end, someone has scrawled NO ONE LOVE
THESE VETTES! in the grime.

The plant is now a condo, and its residents are wondering why the car
are taking up their spaces. “It’s a really beautiful collection,” say
Drew Hauser. “But it’s hard to look at because of the general state o
neglect.” The only clue as to whose they are isn’t even a Vette. It’
a yellow VW Beetle adorned with pink clouds, blue stars, an
multicolored UFOs—the hippie iconography of Peter Max, th
mustachioed pop artist who’s painted five presidents, had a one-ma
show at St. Petersburg’s Hermitage, and sold thousands of posters an
prints. All of which has made him whimsically rich.

And as he tells it in his studio near Lincoln Center, the Corvett
story is a rich man’s lark. “I’m not a car guy. I never drive,” h
says. Nonetheless, on an impulse, he and a friend went to the 199
auto show and saw the collection there. He decided he’d love to pain
them, “Yellow to red, or green to blue.” That same friend woke hi
early the next morning to tell him that they’d been won in a VH
contest by a Long Island carpenter named Dennis Amodeo. Max fell bac
asleep. “And I get the biggest PR dream I’ve ever had,” he says
“Suddenly I see my Peter Max Corvettes coming out onto a footbal
field with cheerleaders on top. There are 60,000 people cheering
screaming. A guy in front of me is screaming to the guy behin
me—he’s holding a frankfurter and mustard is dripping down hi
sleeve, I see this in my dream—he’s screaming right at me, lookin
through me, ‘It’s Peter Max’s cars, man!’

Startled awake, Max picked up the phone, called Amodeo, and got him t
come into the city with a lawyer. Max says he paid just under half
million dollars, “one third of what he asked for.” The plan was to d
limited editions of the cars—but then “the dream wore off,” and, well
“I’ve been so busy.” He vows the project will still happen. Th
condo-board secretary, Michael Rogers, says that the original lesso
of the garage was worried about lack of demand and so happily offere
a large chunk to Max

Don Sherman, an editor at Automobile magazine, who hasn’t seen th
cars, thinks that Max got himself a pretty good deal; Vettes befor
’68 are highly sought-after. (In fact, only 300 of the ’53s were eve
made.) “Just the ones from ’53 to ’68 are probably worth a million an
a half,” he says. And he dismisses the dust and scratches as “surfac
stuff, mostly irrelevant to a collector.”

Told of Max’s plan for them, though, he says, “From a car enthusiast’
standpoint, they’re worth more in their deteriorated condition than i
they were painted by Peter Max.”

http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/people/columns/intelligencer/11902/index.htm
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