Car restoration finds a home in Bridgeport
The decline of Bridgeport manufacturing might be the best thing that ever happened to the local car restoration business.
While the city looks to repurpose the buildings that drew decades of business to the city, members of the restoration industry are preserving more than the history of their clients’ cars.
“It was the mecca of machining and obtaining hard-to-find parts, and if you couldn’t find it, you could have had it made in Bridgeport just because there were so many tools and larger machines capable of creating automobile parts, like the Bridgeport lathes,” said Colton Amster, of Redline Restorations in Black Rock.
For the last 15 years, Amster and his team have worked on vintage automobiles for clients from all over the world.
From mechanical and interior restoration to fabricating parts that are no longer in production, Redline, along with several other business, has carved out a piece of a growing niche market in the city.
Bridgeport’s history of manufacturing has left behind a stock of old warehouse and factory buildings that, with some work, serve as prime locations for businesses owners looking for space to store and work with their clients’ vintage cars.
“At one time, Bridgeport was the best of the best for manufacturing and machining, so I think it falls along with it,” said Matt Carfo, vice president of Black Horse Automotive Services. “Because Bridgeport did so much manufacturing, there are some huge buildings in Bridgeport that are empty.”
Black Horse has been at its East End facility at 726 Union Ave. for more than 20 years. The former machine shop had been vacant for years before the company bought and revamped it.
With 60,000 square feet of former warehouse and factory space, it suits the company’s needs well.
“That gives us enough room to do what we have to do and the buildings are purposefully built for doing what we need to,” he said. “One important thing is we need to have level floors, and since our building was used as a machine shop, the floors are as level as you can get, so that gives us the ability to be more exact with doing alignments.”
The business focuses on maintaining its clients’ cars and offers restoration, preservation, sales and storage. A number of clients have been with the business since it was founded.
Along with spaces that align with the needs of the market, many car restorers have put down roots in Bridgeport because it is cost effective.
Auto restoration providers offer an array of services to their clients, from brokering sales to storage and restoration of antique rides valued up to a several million dollars. That all requires plenty of space and, depending on where you are located, it does not come cheap.
Amster left Stamford and was drawn to the Bridgeport in the early 2000s in search of a facility where he could get the most for his money.
“My rent was going from between $1,500 and $2,000 a month to almost $4,500 a month overnight,” he said. “For a small business, a big change like that was tough.”
Amster brought Redline Restorations to Black Rock, starting in a 20,000-squarefoot space on Fairfield Avenue that was a Studebaker dealership in the 1950s. Although he said negative stigmas of Bridgeport can sometimes make obtaining new clients difficult, that has not kept his business from growing.
He recently moved and expanded the business into a 100,000-square-foot space down the street from his first Bridgeport location. His new space at 2475 Fairfield Ave. is a former Ford dealership.
It did not take long for his former space to get a new tenant, either. The Classic Car Gallery moved from Fairfield to Black Rock location.
Aside from business operations, the architecture of many of the older buildings provides added appeal to business owners as well as customers.
Newcomer Alan Goodman, owner of Classic Car Gallery, which buys cars from the local market and sells them to clients globally, moved from Southport to Bridgeport a few months ago. While the rent was cheaper, he said it was a bonus to have the atmosphere that the unique facilities created for his business.
“The biggest pull for me was the architecture and the feel and so forth of the buildings,” he said. “There are all of these great old and industrial buildings that you don’t find in a town like Southport. We could never have replicated what we found here in Southport.”