Cadillac Ranch

Between the first of May and the seventeenth of May in nineteen seventy-four, a classified advertisement ran in the Amarillo Globe-Times under the name Leo Wyoming. The ad sought used Cadillacs, specifically models from nineteen forty-nine to nineteen sixty-three, for an unspecified purpose. The buyer behind the name was Stanley Marsh three, an Amarillo oil heir and eccentric patron of the arts, who had been contacted several years earlier by an avant-garde architecture and design collective from San Francisco called Ant Farm.

Ant Farm had been given a list of unconventional wealthy people who might fund unusual projects. Stanley Marsh three was on the list. Chip Lord, Doug Michels, and Hudson Marquez of Ant Farm traveled to Amarillo, and what they proposed was this: ten Cadillacs, buried nose-first in a wheat field west of the city, tilted at the same angle as the Great Pyramid of Giza, arranged in a row, facing west. The cars would span the golden age of American automobile design, from the first tailfin year to the last.

Stanley Marsh said yes.

On June twenty-first, nineteen seventy-four, the cars went into the ground. They were placed on a tract of farmland Marsh owned off the historic Route Sixty Six alignment. The wheat grew around them. People came to look. Ant Farm encouraged visitors to spray-paint the cars, and for fifty years that invitation has been accepted continuously. The cars have been repainted so many times that the metal beneath is measurably thicker than it was in nineteen seventy-four.

Cadillac Ranch has been moved once. In nineteen ninety-seven, as urban sprawl closed in from the east, Marsh had all ten cars dug up and replanted two miles further west. The angle of the burial was maintained precisely. Nothing else changed. They are still out there in the Panhandle wind, still accumulating paint.