Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum

There are museums that house great cars, and there are museums that are themselves historic artifacts. The Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum is both. The Art Deco showroom and administration building in which it resides was completed in 1930 at the height of the Auburn Automobile Company's commercial ambitions — a building designed to communicate prosperity and sophistication to the buyers of America's most extravagant automobiles. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2005, and entering it today produces a specific feeling that newer buildings cannot replicate: the sensation of standing inside someone else's ambition.

Errett Lobban Cord was one of the most audacious figures in American automotive history. By the early 1930s, his empire included Auburn, Cord, Duesenberg, Lycoming aircraft engines, Stinson Aircraft, and New York Shipbuilding. The Duesenberg Model J, developed under his direction and introduced in 1928, was built to a single brief: create the finest automobile in the world. At $8,500 for the chassis alone — at a time when a Ford Model A sold for $495 — it was priced as a statement. The supercharged SJ developed 320 horsepower, a figure that many European sports cars wouldn't match for another two decades.

The collection displayed within the building concentrates almost entirely on the three marques that bore Cord's name: Auburn, Cord, and Duesenberg. The 1936 Cord 810, with its disappearing headlights and coffin-nose hood, remains one of the most radical American car designs of the twentieth century. It was a commercial failure and a design triumph — and the museum presents both truths without flinching. The annual Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival each Labor Day weekend turns the surrounding town into a gathering of some of the finest American classics in existence.