Metro Cigar News Fall 1999

Unique New Auto History Museum
The long awaited Museum of Automobile History is now open to the public. Reflecting over two hundred years of the world's love affair with the automobile, the museum is located in the heart of downtown Syracuse, at 321 Clinton St. It is the largest museum anywhere dedicated to memorabilia and art related to the history of the automobile.

Walk through the new Museum of Automobile History in downtown Syracuse, New York, and you'll see the amazing world that the automobile has left in its wake over the past two hundred years, or more. An estimated ten thousand items show the car just exactly as people have seen it, loved it, and laughed at it, all through the years. While you're there, you're bound to find a bit of your own history, too, because the museum encompasses information on motorcycles and trucks, in addition to at least a thousand different makes of cars.

The Museum of Automobile History is the largest private collection of automobilia in the world. So many of its displays are one-of-a-kind that any listing of the contents is a partial one, but you'll see fine art oil paintings and drawings by American and European artists, folk-art models, rare advertising (including a set of legendary Burma-Shave roadside rhyming signs), original photographs, Detroit styling models, autographs and letters, racing memorabilia, dealership and roadside signs, humorous prints, toys galore, Hollywood movie posters, unusual auto accessories and gadgets, colorful pedal cars, showroom posters, and even several presidential-car license plates. The full collection doesn't even fit inside the building - it takes most of the outside wallspace to display an eye-popping set of 20 original billboards (each one measuring 20 feet by 10 feet), long-lost ads for some of the greatest American cars of the 1940's and 1950's. You won't see anything like them anywhere else (except inside the museum, where there are ten more!).

"The automobile is the single most important invention of our time, maybe of all time," says Walter Miller, the founder of the museum. "I'd like people to have a lot of fun being here, but I'd also like them to emerge with an idea or an understanding of what a really big thing the auto has been for all of us."

The collection is displayed in a sleek new setting, measuring 12,000 square feet, each of the two main galleries filled right up to their 25-foot ceilings. You can wander freely and find items pertaining specifically to your favorite cars. Or, going in the order suggested by the displays, you will take a walk through the Age of Automobile, starting with a newspaper account of one of the first attempts at automobiling in the 1770's, and then through to letters, posters, and designer's drawings of the cars of the 1990's.

Keep in mind that there are no-actual cars at the Museum of Automobile History. The other fine collections display cars, this museum presents the entire world around the car: its humor; its tragedies; its greatest successes; and its obscure failures.

If it has anything to do with the automobile, you'll find it.