When you live in a city, there are a few essentials that, once you find reliable sources, you hang on to them like grim death. It can take years to find a decent barber, for instance. Ditto, a dentist you can trust. I had so many friends with nightmare stories about their experiences with Philadelphia dentists that at a point I didn’t have my teeth cleaned for seven years! (When I finally took a chance on a recommendation, it took two appointments to chisel me out – but guess what? No cavities!)
Until I was in my mid-20s, I was able to make do with the professionals and service-providers I grew up with. You know, the people I used since I was a kid, basically. I’d simply head back to the hometown a little early on a Friday and then make it a weekend with my folks. Then I started working seven days a week. That meant I would have to start using city people or resign myself to looking like Ben Gunn.
Most difficult of all was finding a trusted mechanic. I had been reduced to using those while-you-wait oil-change places (at least it got me a free car wash) and shelling out for new tires from a tire center whenever I happened to pick up a nail, which was infuriatingly often. (Thank you, Philadelphia contractors!) Anything more serious than that, and I’d roll the dice and usually get burned.
Then one day, I decided to use this local garage that was about four blocks south of my apartment – which is to say, two blocks below South Street (shallow South Philly). It didn’t look like much – what garage does? – but it was a family business, it had been around for a while, and the lot was always packed.
I owned some pretty high-maintenance vehicles in my time. Once, after I cracked an engine block, the car had been sitting on the street with a leaky trunk for so long (I had a parking permit that was good for a year), that when I finally went to retrieve the paperwork from the glove compartment, I discovered the inside had turned into a giant moldy blueberry. The pages in the manuals were all wavy from the humidity. As the vehicle was hoisted onto a flatbed to be towed away, I kid you not, water poured out of the trunk, like that scene in “Risky Business.”
But I digress.
I can’t remember what exactly was the issue on the occasion that first brought me to 11th Street Auto (a.k.a. Sauer’s Garage). My reasoning was probably that it was close enough that I wouldn’t have to take public transportation or walk miles across town. All I know is that it was love at first sight.
Frank, son of the guy who founded the place decades before, was personable, no-nonsense, always professional in the best possible sense, and clearly compassionate. If he knew you didn’t have two cents to rub together, he would only charge you one. Sometimes he didn’t charge you at all. After they’d done real work too! In fact, 11th Street gave me so many deals, I started to wonder how it was that they could even afford to keep the doors open.
What’s more, I would send my friends there, and they wouldn’t charge them either! I guess they just dealt in volume, and they built such a loyal, grateful clientele that they never hurt for business. I don’t know, maybe the really big jobs carried a lot of the lesser ones? Either that, or the entire operation was a front. (Just kidding.)
Doing business with 11th Street was a throwback to a lost age of handshake agreements and keys left under mats in unlocked vehicles after hours. Now that I think about it, nobody in their right mind would ever want to cross Frank. He may have been a nice guy, but he had the kind of physique that comes from bench-pressing engine blocks for a living. I remember walking into the darkened lot at 10:00 at night, having just gotten back from work at the radio station in the Trenton-Princeton area, and the incredulous feeling on finding, lo and behold, my car, like the Star-Spangled Banner, was still there.
I finally got the hell out of Philly eight years ago, having done my time and then some (32 years I’ll never get back), but I still drive in from time to time to meet friends for dinner or head to a concert. And I noticed some months ago that Sauer’s had closed. It struck me as the closing of any beloved institution does. I felt a pang of sadness and a wave of nostalgia. More recently, I saw a chain-link fence had been erected around the lot, an ominous harbinger of things to come. Sure enough, on my next trip in, the building had been demolished.
I was afraid that illness or death had led to the closure of the business. I am thankful, at the very least, to have found the news story at the link below. It’s amazing how certain people and businesses that flourished before the rise of the internet so often leave the scarcest footprints.
Anyway, Frank is alive and well. He says it just felt like it was time (to close, that is). I’m sure the garage made enough that retirement was possible at 60. Still, he leaves a gaping hole – now literally, alas – in the fabric of old Philadelphia. Honest, affordable, mom-and-pop mechanics are not easy to come by. This was not a chain, but rather a small business that grew up organically with its neighborhood.
Frank is as decent as the longest day at midsummer. His lieutenants were equally trustworthy. They sent a lot of positive vibes out into the world, and that counts for a lot in Philadelphia. This was more than just an automotive shop. It was like taking your car to a mechanically-inclined uncle who would often fix or install something for the sheer satisfaction of it. I wish them all the best – thanks, guys! – and for Frank, a long and happy retirement.
