Seen in the parking lot on leaving The Gallery Pastry Shop after brunch yesterday morning: This gorgeous old thing...
It's a 1932 Cadillac 452B Fleetwood Madame X Sedan...
...powered by
Cadillac's V16 engine, for when your oil company successfully acquired a railroad and a telegraph company and you wanted to distinguish yourself from your V12-driving neighbors.
Looking at auction prices for these V16 beasts, it takes a moment to realize that, even though they are fetching anywhere from $150,000 for the most common to over half a million for the rarest variants, they haven't really appreciated much since the early days of the Depression, when the
Madame X cars fetched north of $7,000.
.
