Car Stuff: Unabashedly Basic

On my last day working in Harvard Square, a week before Halloween, I was out at lunchtime and spotted this dark green Chevrolet Nova on Church Street, next to the First Parish Unitarian Church. (It's kind of blurry because I had to crop out quite a lot.)

From the other side of the street, at first I wasn't quite sure of what I was seeing. Chevrolet made millions of Novas, but they are a rare sight today. This design was made for model years 1968 to 1972, and hardly anything changed during that time, but the orange turn signal lenses in the front bumper identify this car as a '72. And those wheel covers appear in the brochure for that year, but there's no way to know if these are original to the car.

What I love about cars like this, from this time period, is that they were practical, simple, basic transportation, relatively economical to own and operate. But Detroit was already in the throes of Broughamification, an obsession with dressing up every vehicle that would end up working against it.