Classic and custom cars find plenty of parking on South Allen Street

Eye appeal doesn’t necessarily translate to great gas mileage.

“Golden Envy” is a Ford F-250 pickup truck that looks like it probably had to be airdropped onto the middle of South Allen Street in downtown State College.

It wasn’t of course — bad for the paint job — but the alternative is the equivalent of trying to imagine how somebody parked a customized tank into a tiny little spot outside of the Municipal Building.

The shock value alone is kind of the whole point.

“I enjoy watching people and their expressions when they see the truck,” Bart Kilraine, of Revloc, Cambria County, said.

The auto enthusiast and his chrome-covered baby were in town for the Last Cruise, a car and motorcycle show benefiting the Centre County Youth Service Bureau.

Kilraine last attended the event seven years ago, shortly after he purchased the truck but before he made any modifications.

He’s been to four car shows this summer, anxious to show off the vehicle’s latest round of enhancements, including a chrome undercarriage.

“Chrome is my biggest thing,” Kilraine said.

He’s speaking figuratively. The biggest thing on the truck actually looks like the wheels, which seemed taller than most 9-year-olds.

According to Kilraine, it’s one of the perks of favoring modifications over restorations — the owner has no fidelity to history, only the limits of their own imaginations.

“I like the bling. I like to be different,” Kilraine said.

Further down Allen Street, Holly McDonough, of State College, was showing off a scrapbook chronicling her husband and son’s painstaking restoration of a 1962 MGA.

Purchased from a man in Altoona, the car parked along South Allen Street on Sunday bore virtually no resemblance to the heap of rust and spare parts featured in the earliest pages of the scrapbook.

The labor to restore the vehicle began just after Christmas of 2000 and didn’t conclude for another two years.

Holly McDonough and her husband, Patrick, have regularly taken the car — cream colored with a burgundy interior — on picnics in Rothrock State Forest or just out for a short drive.

“We ride it every night that it’s pretty,” McDonough said.

This story was originally published July 31, 2017 at 12:11 AM with the headline "Classic and custom cars find plenty of parking on South Allen Street."