Residents of the suburban Chicago area may best associate Joe Bortz with a series of restaurants and nightclubs. But for car buffs and automotive historians, Bortz is a savior of sorts for vintage concept cars of the 1950s and '60s.
If you're at all familiar with Bortz's story, you may recognize the name Warhoops. Located in Sterling Heights, Michigan, this junkyard doesn't stand out from the typical backwoods scrapper until you realize where it's been located for the past several decades: just a few miles away from General Motors' Technical Center.
That proximity led GM to use Warhoops as a preferred scrapper as far back as the 1950s. Should a company car become wrecked, there was a good chance its carcass would be hauled down Van Dyke Road to the yard's gate. A common occurrence, but the plot thickens: GM also chose Warhoops as a final destination for its conceptual one-offs.
For liability purposes, GM couldn't let experimental wonders or stylistic studies into the hands of John Q. Public, so - often against the passionate pleas of designers - the cars were scheduled for destruction. Yet for whatever reason, that didn't always happen. In the 1980s, Bortz found Warhoops to still be in possession of a number of GM concepts; the '54 LaSalle II and the '58 Chevrolet Biscayne are two examples. Bortz bought the cars, worked on restoring them. The rest, as they say, is history.
Which brings me to Greg Steinmayer's photo gallery. Steinmayer managed to walk the yard in the early 1990s, and he thankfullyhad the foresight to bring along a camera. His photos of a decrepit LaSalle II and a diced Biscayne tug at the heartstrings, even though they've been adopted and saved from further decay.
If you're hoping to strike concept gold out at the lot, forget it. I visited the lot nearly three years back, and while there were a number of oddball heaps at Warhoops - such as a twisted '63 GMC medium-duty truck with a V-12 and a Checker Aerobus devoid of its front clip - there were no remnants of GM experimentation lying around.
Unless, that is, you're into that 1958 GM prototype earthmover used to move junk around the yard...
Source: Fotki