in a Brooklyn garage, Lenny is fixing classic 50's cars. This is the coolest thing I've seen all month... damn, I wish I could work in that garage!

Peter Crosby is the Brooklyn filmmaker behind such documentary shorts as Friends of Firefighters (featuring Steve Buscemi) and the award-winning The Oyster Men. His latest film, “Lenny’s Garage,” is a profile of Leonard Shiller, a lifelong resident of Brooklyn, and the president of the Antique Auto Association of Brooklyn, who has a Gowanus garage full of 58 classic cars, vintage bikes and motorcycles, and other memorabilia.

The gorgeously photographed film is a rare opportunity to peek inside his classic car collection, which a 1929 Durant rumble-seat coupe,
a 1951 Hudson Pacemaker,
a 1979 New York City checker cab,
a 1965 Ford Good Humor Ice Cream truck, curiosities like
a 1947 International KB-6 soda truck (with period-correct seltzer bottles),
 a 1961 Messerschmitt KR200 bubble car and
a 1954 Packard ambulance..

This isn’t the Smithsonian, though — Schiller keeps the garage jam-packed with car parts and likes to get his hands dirty.

The building was once an oven for the California Pie Company, Mr. Shiller said. When the bakery went out of business a truck repair shop moved in; Mr. Shiller bought the place from the shop’s owner in 1996. “What’s amazing about this building is that it peaks at 30 feet, and it has no columns,” he said. “It’s all steel-truss construction and a concrete-slab roof.”

His first car, the Chevy, belonged to his grandmother and was stored in her barn in the Catskills until it was given to Mr. Shiller in 1967, “not without a lot of prodding.”

He paid for his next car, a 1954 Mercury Monterey two-door hardtop that belonged to a 99-year-old retired lawyer. It had 19,000 miles and cost $250, he said.

Educated as an economist, he disliked office work and gave up that career to renovate houses in Park Slope. He did that from 1970 to 1980, which was when he started buying property. “My goal was to have enough passive income — although it’s not totally passive — to be able to do this,” he explained. “So now, financially, I can do it.”

When Mr. Shiller began collecting, his plan was to acquire cars of each year from 1936 to 1958. “I don’t like fins,” he said, explaining his choice of an end date before the peak of the tailfin craze.

But then a friend told him about a pale yellow 1954 Chrysler New Yorker Deluxe convertible that had become available (very few were made). Already owning the Mercury from ’54, his plan of one example per model year went out the window.

Some of his vehicles have become minor celebrities, he said. The ’54 Chrysler was in the music video for “Smooth” by Carlos Santana, and his 1965 Chrysler 300 convertible was “as big as a whale” in B-52’s video for “Love Shack.”

www.core77.com/posts/41551/In-a-Massive-Brooklyn-Garage-a-Man-is-Patiently-Repairing-58-Classic-Cars

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/classic-car-show-benefit-park-slope-group-battle-new-york-hospital-expansion-plan-article-1.1728601

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/automobiles/collectibles/05EGO.html?_r=0

Huge thanks to Lenny for sharing his collection, and to Peter Crosby for filming this video!

petercrosbyphotography.com
twitter.com/peterbcrosby
 pbcrosby@gmail.com