This occurred to me in the park­ing lot of my (much-loved) YMCA: remem­ber a mil­lion years ago how you would some­times see non-convertible cars with cloth tops?

Young­sters, I’m talk­ing about these:

Sweet, right? Frankly, I’d kind of for­got­ten they existed at some point. I seem to remem­ber them as part of “spe­cial edi­tion” pack­ages, those cars (for some rea­son, Buick did this a lot) with scrolly type and a name on the side. A quick tum­ble through Craigslist con­firms this, as there seem to plenty of Buick Le Sabre Palm Beach Edi­tions out there, if anyone’s looking…

Back to my point: I see these tops on cars all the damn time down here. My sources say these became increas­ingly rare in the past ten years, with Lin­coln mak­ing one of the last ones in 2002. This can only mean one thing: peo­ple are tak­ing per­fectly good cars and hav­ing these roofs added to them.

Awe­some.