Boulevard

Boulevard (pronounced bool-uh-vahrd or boo-luh-vahrd)

(1) A broad avenue in a city, usually with areas at the sides or in the center planted with trees, grass, or flowers, often used as a promenade.

(2) A strip of lawn between a sidewalk (footpath) and the curb (a regionalism from the upper Midwest US & Canada, also called a boulevard strip).

(3) As loosely applied in street names in many cities, usually for wide thoroughfares.

(4) The centre strip of a road dividing traffic travelling in different directions (rare and sometimes applied also to the landscaped sides).

1769: From the French boulevard (broad street or promenade planted with rows of trees), from the Middle French boulevard, bollevart, boulevars, bolevers & bollewerc (promenade, avenue, rampart), either from the Middle High German bolewerc & bolwerc (which endures in modern German as Bollwerk) or the Middle Dutch bolwerc & bollewerc (“bulwark, bastion”), the latter from the Picard, Walloon in the sense of “rampart, avenue built on the site of a razed rampart”, so called because the structures were originally often built on the ruins of old ramparts.  The apparently strange transition from the Middle Dutch bolwerc (wall of a fortification) to the French boulevard, originally (top surface of a military rampart, used as a thoroughfare) is explained by the linguistic tangle of translation, the French language at the time having no “w”, hence the early attempts including boloart, boulever, boloirque & bollvercq.

Lindsay Lohan leaving Boulevard3 nightclub, Los Angeles, 2009.

Although there’s now usually no direct relationship, the idea of boulevards being wider than most streets and with associated landscaping dates from the early promenades being laid out atop demolished city walls, structures which were much wider than the usually narrow urban streets.  The word was adopted in English because there was a frank admiration of the layout of Paris and the Americans picked it up as an obvious differentiation for some of the widest streets of their newer cities although there was sometimes also an element of a wish to emulate European style.  The word is used in many countries with the same French spelling adopted in English although there are variants including the Spanish bulevar and the Turkish bulvar and in Italian the word is sometimes used in the otherwise archaic sense of embankment (a direct inheritance of the sense of “rampart”).  The noun boulevardier dates from 1856 and deconstructed literally means “one who frequents the boulevard”, the implication being ”man-about-town, a city dweller, part of café society”.  Boulevardier was later adopted (also as boulevard cruiser & boulevard car) to describe cars which ape the style of high-speed machines but sacrifice performance for comfort and ease of operation.  In urban cartography & town planning the most common abbreviation is blvd. but bd. & bl. are also used.  Boulevard is a noun and boulevardier is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is boulevards.

The Boulevardier cocktail

Erskine Gwynne (1898-1948) between 1927-1932 was the publisher of Paris Boulevardier, an English-language magazine in the vein of the New Yorker, its market the then quite large colony of Anglo-American expats living in Paris.  While in Paris, Gwynne created a cocktail called the Boulevardier which he suggested was the ideal drink for his readership but it was after it was included in Harry MacElhone’s (1890-1958) book Barflies and Cocktails (1927), that it became popular on both sides of the Atlantic.

Made with whiskey, sweet vermouth and Campari, the Boulevardier is a variation of the classic Negroni, renowned when properly mixed for its deft balance of bitter, boozy and sweet (although some anthologies of cocktails asterisk a proviso that women often prefer them with more vermouth and thus sweeter).  However, while the gin-based Negroni is crisp and refreshing, the whiskey-rich Boulevardier is rich and warming, very much a drink for dark evenings.  Traditionally, it was made with bourbon but there are recipes which use the spicier rye whiskey and, unlike a Negroini where classically the ingredients are in equal parts, a Boulevardier mixes the whiskey in a slightly higher proportion.  It’s served on ice, stirred and garnished with an orange twist.

Ingredients

1 ¼ ounces bourbon whiskey

1 oz Campari

1 oz sweet vermouth

Garnish: orange twist

Instructions

Add bourbon, Campari and sweet vermouth into a mixing glass with ice and stir until well-chilled.  Strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice.  Garnish with an orange twist.

Boulevard cars

1961 Chevrolet Impala SS.

The idea of the “boulevard car” was concocted to describe cars which ape the style of high-speed machines but sacrifice performance for comfort and ease of operation, usually at a lower price; for show rather than go as it were.  Chevrolet had actually institutionalized the concept with what became their popular SS (Super Sport) option pack, released in 1961 as a bundle available for Impalas with high-performance V8s.  It featured both suspension modifications and dress-up items including unique body and interior trim, power steering, power brakes with sintered metallic linings, full wheel covers with a three blade spinner, a passenger grab bar, a console for the floor shift, and a tachometer on the steering column.  In that year, Chevrolet built close to half a million Impalas but only 453 buyers opted for what was (at US$53.80) the bargain-priced SS package, an indication the marketing needed to be tweaked.  The problem was that Chevrolet had intended the 1961 SS live up to its name and it was available only with the 348 & 409 cubic inch (5.7 & 6.7 litre) V8s which could be quite raucous and were notably thirstier than many were prepared to tolerate.  The dealers noted how buyers were drawn to the style but were put off by the specification which demanded much more from the driver that the smaller-engined models which wafted effortlessly along, automatic transmissions by now the default choice for most Impala buyers.

1967 Chevrolet SS427.

So the sales barrier was the implication of the costs attached to the SS bundle rather than the attractiveness.  The headline number of US$53.80 actually included only the "spinner" wheel covers, SS badges, a shiny floor plate for the four-speed's shifter and a Corvette-style grab-bar for the glove-box (Ralph Nadar (b 1934) noted that one).  However, ticking the SS option box triggered a list of "mandatory options" (a seeming oxymoron Detroit came to adore) including wider tyres (with compulsory narrow-band whitewalls), PAS & PB, (power assisted steering & power brakes), LPO (Limited Production Option) 1108 (Police Handling Package, a bundle including HD (heavy-duty) suspension components and sintered metallic brake linings), a steering column mounted 7000 rpm tachometer and a padded dashboard (the last unlikely much to impress Mr Nader).  Having agreed to pay for all that, the buyer then had to decide whether to opt (at progressively increasing cost) for the 348 (with 305, 340 or 350 horsepower (HP)) or 409 (360 HP).  The Powerglide two-speed  automatic transmission was available only with the mildest of the 348s, further limiting the sales potential, the three or four-speed manual otherwise obligatory.  In 1961, it was much more expensive to buy a SS Chevrolet than the US$53.80 on the brochure suggested and however pleasing, it was a long way removed from Chevrolet's traditional place as the low-priced rung on the "Sloan ladder".  The decision was thus taken for 1962 to make the "show" available without the "go" and the SS became an "appearance package", available with even six-cylinder engines.  Sales skyrocketed and between 1962-1969 some 920,000 SS packages were sold for the full-sized line.

1973 Porsche 911T-Lux Targa (left) and 1973 Porsche 911S Targa (right).  The driving experiences were very different but visually, unless closely inspected, it took a well-trained eye to tell the difference. 

GM had noted the dress-up bits were just Chevrolet part-numbers which could be ordered by dealers, some of which received customer requests separately to fit the trim pieces so some 1961 Impalas did to some extent resemble the SS cars though without the high-performance equipment.  It was therefore clear there were more buyers who wanted their Impala to look like a a fast one than were able or prepared to pay for the experience and Chevrolet’s “SS appearance package” proved influential, the approach becoming a a template for the whole industry, spreading internationally, the Porsche 911T Lux (1972-1973) an example.  The entry level 911T was the least powerful of the range and lacked some of the luxury fittings of the more expensive and more powerful 911E & 911S but for those who wanted the fittings but had no desire for the horsepower, the 911T-Lux was created which combined the mechanical specification of the "T" with the trim of the "S", the factory doing exactly what so many of Chevrolet's SS customers settled on after 1962.

Chevrolet’s solution was to become a template for the whole industry which would spend the next decade making, advertising (and, in relatively small numbers, selling) the so-called "muscle cars" which would become so storied.  The muscle-car ecosystem of those years is better documented and more celebrated than any other phase through which Detroit passed yet the numbers of the genuine high performance machines produced was tiny compared to total production of the models upon which they were based.  The experience of 1961 convinced Chevrolet that what most people wanted was not a tyre-melting muscle car (which came with a thirsty, noisy and sometimes cantankerous engine along with what would become prohibitively expensive insurance rates) but one which looked like one.  Splitting the market between drag-strip monsters and boulevard cruisers which could be made to look much the same proved a great success.  For some reason though, late in the decade Chevrolet briefly offered the stand-alone SS 427 in an Impala body but without the Impala badge while, confusingly, the actual Impala could be ordered with both the SS package and the 427 cubic inch (7.0 litre) V8.  Thus there was the SS 427 and the Impala SS 427, the former rather more special and much sought after today so many clones of both have been concocted, leading to a small industry of specialists able to pick real from fake, the difference a matter (in the collector market) of tens of thousands of dollars.

1958 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Roadster. 

Manufacturers had been pursuing the concept even before Chevrolet formalized it in the marketing manual.  Even in the interwar years the coincidently named SS cars (which after 1945 become Jaguar) offered essentially the same racy looking machines in a variety of configurations, some of which delivered the performance the lines promised and some did not, the former thought of as genuine sports cars, the latter we would now call boulevard cruisers.  Jaguar considered pursuing the strategy in the early post-war years before deciding sports cars really should all be sporty and although their saloons would come with engines small and large, the roadsters and coupés would be about both show and go.  Mercedes-Benz understood the attraction the 300SL gullwing (W198) had for buyers but knew also it, and the planned roadster version which would be its replacement, were always going to be too expensive for most and that few of them anyway needed a car which could hit what was in the 1950s a most impressive 150 mph (240 km/h).  What they wanted was a stylish machine which recalled the 300 SL in which to cruise along wide boulevards.

1955 Mercedes Benz 190 SL.

Thus was crafted the 190 SL (W121; 1955-1963), built on the modest platform of the company’s small, four cylinder saloon rather than the exotic space-frame of the 300 SL.  Eschewed too were costly features like dry-sump lubrication and fuel-injection and the engine was barely more powerful than in the saloon but for a boulevard cruiser that was perfect and over an eight-year run, it out-sold the expensive 300 SL roadster a dozen-fold.  There were plans even for a 220 SL, using the 2.2 litre (134 cubic inch) six cylinder from the “pontoon” saloon and prototypes were built but the continuing success of the 190SL and capacity constraints first postponed and finally doomed the project.  Even this had been an attempt not to create a true sports car but instead make the little roadster cruise the boulevards more smoothly and, in the decades which followed, this indeed was the historic course subsequent generations of the SL would follow.  It would not be until the 1990s some SLs again became genuinely fast and in the twenty-first century the factory returned to making versions for which a racetrack would seem a native environment.