Striking Photos of Car “Boneyards” in ’80s Brooklyn

By Flavorwire Staff

June 12, 2012

You probably wouldn’t walk down a street in trendy Williamsburg, Brooklyn nowadays and see the skeletal remnants of a car, unless it was for some sort of art project. But in 1988, “car stripping” was quite common. Convenient for auto thieves because it was relatively empty and located near the river (which made disposal a cinch), the neighborhood was riddled with the corpses of these half-disassembled cars, their scavenged parts resold to shops and their leftovers half-submerged in water or abandoned in dilapidated warehouses. Captured by photographer James Cathcart, these scenes look like post-apocalyptic landscapes, like war zones, like the boneyards of dead animals for which they’re named. See the exhibit now at the Causey Contemporary Gallery through July 15, and flip through a few shot collected by PDN below.

Photo credit: James Cathcart