BRINGING EUROPE’S ROADSTERS TO PARK AVENUE
N.Y. dealer turned Americans on to European cars, writes Nicholas Maronese.
Every time we sell a sports car, it’s important to talk about that, about our heritage.
Today, you would walk by 56th Street and Park Avenue in New York without blinking. It’s just another glass-walled bank office at a bustling intersection. But in 1955, you would almost certainly stop and gawk at the cars in the window: new Porsche Speedsters and BMW convertibles on a turntable, a Jaguar or Mercedes-Benz on the ramp above them.
It would likely be your first time seeing any of these brands. After all, this would be before the dealership you’re looking at — Hoffman Motor Company — made them household names.
In 1955 New York, Max Hoffman had made strides launching the U.S. operations of automakers such as Jaguar and BMW. That year, he was responsible for one in five new Porsches sold globally. But he wasn’t finished. By his retirement two decades later, he would have helped make America the most important market for Porsche and nearly single-handedly turned the country on to imported European sports cars.
Vienna-born Maximilian Hoffman spent his youth racing motorcycles and cars, but in 1934 he began importing autos, moving some of the first Volvos from Scandinavia into Central Europe.
His German neighbours’ politics causing him alarm, Hoffman fled to France, and then to New York in 1941. Besides having an eye for design, Hoffman was an astute marketer: with a few hundred dollars he founded a costume jewelry business, making $5,000 his first week.
In the summer of 1946, with the war over, Hoffman visited Europe to examine how feasible it would be to import cars from England, France and Germany to the U.S.
In 1947, he opened Hoffman Motor Company with but a single (extremely expensive) car on the sales floor: a Figoni et Falaschi-bodied Delahaye coupe. In June of that year, Road & Track wrote about his dealership with the headline “Europe on Park Avenue.”
Hoffman became Jaguar’s East Coast distributor in 1948, and rapidly grew his network, later setting up a second office in Chicago. He took a risk importing the Volkswagen Beetle in 1949 but, struggling to sell it, gave up four years later, about a decade before it became one of the country’s most popular imports.
It was around 1949, too, when Hoffman started hearing good things from friends in his native Austria about an upstart German sports car manufacturer. It was time, he decided, to pay a visit to Ferdinand Porsche.
Porsche counts the U.S. as the largest market for its sports cars, and has for nearly six decades. It sold a record 55,420 cars in the U.S. in 2017, and has seen its American sales grow for the past eight years straight.
“It’s really our most important market, from the sports car side,” says Dave Engelman, spokesman for Porsche North America Motorsports & Brand Heritage. “Every time we sell a sports car, it’s important to talk about that, about our heritage, because we don’t want to be known as just a four-door (SUV ) brand.”
That incredible success started at the 1950 Paris auto show, where Hoffman met with an ailing Ferdinand Porsche and his son, Ferry, to discuss importing Porsche 356 sports cars.
Ferry felt cautious about the American market, and expected sales to start at five cars a year. Hoffman had ambitions to sell five cars a week. The two parties struck a deal for 15 cars, with the first two showing up on U.S. shores in October 1950.
Hoffman trusted the adage “win on Sunday, sell on Monday,” and so resumed his racing career in 1950 at Watkins Glen, in one of the 356s. His victory convinced motorsports legend Briggs Cunningham to buy one of the others.
The Porsche was, Hoffman said, “the German automotive jewel,” and customers bought the pitch. He sold 32 cars in 1951, but thought the brand needed better marketing. Good thing Hoffman had ideas.
Over a lunch in New York, Hoffman underscored to Ferry how important American buyers thought an attractive badge or emblem was.
“He had been urging us to do this for some time,” Ferry recalled in his memoirs.
“If all you want is a coat of arms, you can get one from us!” the young Porsche replied, sketching on a napkin the shield that would become Porsche’s logo. It first appeared on the automaker’s 1952 cars.
Porsche installed some of its own sales staff at Hoffman’s New York location, to whom Hoffman would make insistences such as “Americans won’t buy cars without real names.” And so the 356 roadster became the “America,” the coupe the “Continental.”
Some 141 Porsches left Hoffman’s lot in 1952, but he still saw room for growth. The brand’s Cabriolet, nicknamed the damen or “queen” in Germany, came with a padded top and radio but cost $4,500 — more than a Cadillac convertible. Taking a hint from John von Neumann, Porsche’s West Coast distributor, Hoffman suggested a lowcost stripped-down “Speedster” version. Introduced in America in September 1954, it eventually sold 4,854 units.
Hoffman’s tactics included pioneering the European collector car market. Where other dealers would buy back their own imports at marked-down values, Hoffman gave customers trading in well-maintained lowmileage sports cars more money than he’d sold them the car for. Another 573 Porsches left his dealership in 1953.
In 1953, Hoffman commissioned renowned architect and designer Frank Lloyd Wright to draft him a new dealership at 430 Park Avenue in New York, partly paying Wright with a pair of Mercedes-Benzes. The beautifully thought-out space centred on a three- or four-car turntable half-surrounded by a car display ramp.
It opened in 1955, not long before the Porsche of America Corp. was founded and set up its own New York office, in October. Hoffman reportedly conducted test drives right on Park Avenue. He sold the property to Mercedes-Benz in 1958, which renovated it twice before letting it go in 2008. In 2013, as documents deeming the space a heritage site were being drawn, its new owners gutted the building.
But back in the 1960s, Hoffman’s sales kept growing, as he established more foreign automakers in America, including Alfa Romeo. By 1963, Porsche was selling 6,000 cars annually in the U.S., and formally took over its own distribution, splitting from Hoffman.
The magnate turned his attention to building up BMW, and would eventually sell his company to the German brand, retiring in 1975. He died in 1981, and the fortune he left behind was used to fund several charities.
It stands to reason that, without Max Hoffman, Porsche wouldn’t have broken into the U.S. market the way it did. That goes, too, for Mercedes-Benz, BMW and a host of other Continental carmakers. The reputations of these companies on this side of the Atlantic were built on Hoffman’s marketing, and on the little piece of Europe he brought to Park Avenue.