This Malaise-Era Chrysler Had The Most Ridiculous Rear Door Window Solution Ever

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The late 1970s were a strange time for so many things, and while people tend to focus on the drugs and fashion and general debauchery, they often forget to note one of the most profound victims of the excesses and warped thinking of the time: the rear door windows of the 1979 to 1981 Chrysler New Yorker Fifth Avenue. Really, it’s whole rear doors, which are such an overdone and tortured design that the study of them is required for anyone hoping to become a genuine, accredited psychopath. Let’s take a look at these ridiculous things!

I should note that my attention was brought, really dragged, to these doors from one of our valued Kiwi readers, Jason of New Zealand, who emailed me just to be sure I was aware. Oh, I’m aware now, Jason, very aware. 

Keep in mind, the whole Malaise era was sort of a low ebb for rear door windows as it was; many cars had rear windows that, for bullshit “safety” reasons masking the fact that designers and engineers seem to have forgotten how to make a door window not impact the rear wheel when down, only lowered halfway. Even worse, GM built countless cars on their A- and G-bodies that had rear door windows that didn’t roll down at all, cooking kids in the back seat like you were picking them up from the arcade in an air fryer.

These windows do seem to go down, but, well, look at them:

Ny Door1

 

Do you see what I’m getting at here? Because of what I think may have been a Carter Administration Presidential Order, the New Yorker had to have some sort of opera window, but instead of cutting a hole for the opera window in the still-quite-thick C-pillar, Chrysler decided to hack it out of the door window area itself, leaving what may be the narrowest opening door window in a car not designed to appeal to the giraffe community.

Look at that thing! You couldn’t hand someone a hot dog through that window unless you rotated it 90°, and then you’d be dumping chili and slaw and relish and onions (I’m assuming this hot dog would have everything on it, because this is a New Yorker, the flagship of the Chrysler fleet, not some pile of shit like a Volaré) all over that rich, sumptuous, buttery interior.

I don’t think you can really appreciate the stupidity of this window until you see the door open:

Lookatit

That’s a…half-frameless door? Who the hell makes a half-framed/half-unframed door? With that pull strap in the middle and the light and the upholstery, this thing is an absolute Malaise Marvel. Wow.

Now, the 1980 Cadillac Seville comes sort of close to this madness:

Seville

…but not really. That’s just a framed little window, it’s not the whole bulky Opera Window Operating Complex that’s commanding half that window-area real estate on the New Yorker door.

I just can’t get over the madness of that door. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen mawkish opulence take such a brutal toll on the design of a door.

I do have to give Chrysler credit for having color-coordinated bumper rubber impact strips; I have a particular fondness for those. As does Mr.Sportcoat there, clearly:

Bumperstrips

These doors’ complex shape may have been hard to seal as well, something I suspect by watching this hilariously disastrous review that noted the rear door didn’t seal, causing a leak that soaked the rear carpet:

Look at this mess!

Waterleak

I’ve actually written about this astounding review before, which also included such gems as the digital clock going out every time the brakes went on and the A/C crapping out.

Man, what glorious pile that New Yorker was! What a time to have been alive.

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76 thoughts on “This Malaise-Era Chrysler Had The Most Ridiculous Rear Door Window Solution Ever”

  1. Amazing how Bob just takes all the QC issues completely in stride in that review. “Well, the hazard switch doesn’t work and the interior lights are sporadic at best and it leaks like a sieve, but the paint is good because it only has one spot where the mope who was painting it took a nap halfway down the side!”

  3. There are some real advantages to permanently bonding the door windows into a light frame – very easy to seal, useful as a reinforcement at the top of the beltline, and impossible to run a slimjim into – and I’d like to see that come back now that we all have air conditioning. It would also help lower the beltline now that they don’t have to retract.

    A sunroof would have to be standard so you didn’t get shot for opening your door when you got pulled over.

  4. “That’s a…half-frameless door? Who the hell makes a half-framed/half-unframed door? ” Chrysler that’s who!!!! And you’ll miss them when they’re gone and feel bad about writing this….or not.

  5. I wonder if they could have made the rear door design set and use one window for both parts. Roll down one window and bother parts arecrolled down.

    1. Chrysler Corporation had such a design in 1956. The rear doors had two pieces of glass. When you cranked the window, the small piece over the wheel arch rotated into the door shell while the big piece retracted into the door as usual.

    1. New guy not recording 1970s Bob for car reviews? We love Bob here. Don’t pick on him or you will suffer my wrath. Which to be honest isn’t anything specific, but you will suffer my wrath.

  8. This a sad, sad symptom of The Attack Of The Landau Roofs. Clearly, a Landau Roof Spore landed on the rear glass, and quickly consumed the C pillars and the trailing edge of the roof plane. But it was hungry. Hungry for more. And so it has consumed nearly half of the rear door window.
    Given time it will reach the hood, and all will perish.

    1. Thanks for the laugh!
      Had I the animation skills, I would turn this idea into a short-short. The music would have to be over-the-top bombastic of course. 😉

  9. You should see how they installed the rear window on the next gen of 5th Avenue. They sawed the rear window frame off a standard M-body Dodge (Diplomat) and put in a fiberglass plug that housed the more upright rear window, pretty sure that’s why they had the rear 1/4 vinyl roof – to hide the mess they made of the body back there.

  11. That would be an annoying rear window the play the alphabet game out of, but at least it’s not the rear seat of a Toyota CH-R, where you’d be lucky to get past ‘B’ before someone finds that tricky ‘Z.’ It’s more of a clerestory window than a normal car window.

  13. Scene: Somewhere at Chrysler HQ, circa 1977:

    “Hey guys! Anybody got a cheap-as-chips idea for dolling up a Grand Fury so we can sell it as a Chrysler for 50% more?

  14. A few years ago there was one of these at the Malaise Daze car show in LA and I was just as fascinated with that door and spent a few minutes looking over the interior of this car in general. I couldn’t believe these were frameless doors until I saw the owner open them.

  15. I owned a 1981 Chrysler New Yorker 5th Ave. Chocolate brown with chocolate brown leather and a sweet moonroof. It is the car I love more than any other I’ve owned and I kick myself (mentally) every time I think about it for selling it to my brother. It is the most comfortable, silkiest, classiest car I’ve had. The leather was amazingly soft. It had thick carpet that made me want to take my shoes off when I got in. And in the 91,000 miles I had it, it was just that junky computer carburetor that went wrong. I’ve thought about buying one and fixing it up but it would be too hard to get parts. There is nothing anyone can say to shame me. I loved the landau roof. I loved the chrome. I loved everything about that car. It was nicer than any Cadillac or Lincoln or the vinyl and crappy plywood veneer filled Mercedes.

      1. Yeah, enjoy your Mbux or whatever their word for shitty vinyl is. I also had a 1981 MB 240D. Tan with brown vinyl. The drivetrain was impeccable. The interior was shit.

        2. I usually prefer cloth over leather, but I find those synthetic leather seats to be incredibly comfortable as well as being as durable as an anvil. Plus it looks great. Tastes are subjective, but I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like the interior.

          1. The veneer started warping and peeling back in 2 years. There was a vent outlet under the dash that cracked and rattled, especially at idle. It had a strange glue-ey smell. I traded it for a 1983 Olds Delta 88. Another fantastic car, though nowhere near as nice as the 5th Ave, but worlds better than the 240D.

    3. I had a room mate that sometime in the mid 90s bought an 82 Chrysler Imperial. It was glorious. Total garbage but amazing and wonderful. So plush and luxurious but in the most penny pinching way possible.

  16. The problem with them sealing wasn’t necessarily the shape of the door and windows. The problem was the actual roof rail design and the windows being frameless. In the 1950s when pillarless hardtop coupes and sedans became a thing the actual horizontal recess for the window cut quite a bit into the trim of the heavily domed roof and the windows had trim that rose with them to slot into that recess. In the 1960s as the roofs flattened out the side windows began to take on a convex curve, allowing them to snugly press up against the rubber door seals meaning they often didn’t need the trim on all sides and the recess could be much shallower if it existed at all. For example compare a ’58 DeSoto Fireflight hardtop sedan to a ’69 Chevrolet Impala hardtop sedan and you’ll see the evolution.

    Guess what happens when you don’t have that trim frame, recess, or convex curve because the naked and near flat glass is just raised up next to the door frame’s metal trim instead of being pressed to a rubber seal? It shakes, shakes, shakes, señora. And it gets worse when the body flexes because this is the 1970s and materials science became forgotten knowledge the same way Roman aqueducts were during the medieval period.

  17. Oh, I remember these well.

    When they were first introduced, we saw one parked in the Del Monte Shopping Center in Monterey – along with the new LeBaron and Cordova – all in that beautiful deep mahogany metallic with matching leather and landau tops. It was quite the display by Chrysler.

    (Funnily enough – the 1973 Mercury brochure showed the new boxier Marquis in the same open air shopping center)

    Later, a family who had a daughter in my HS class purchased a yellow Fifth Avenue, exactly like the one in the brochure photos above – and drove her to school in it every day.

    Later, when the little Chrysler Volare LeBaron became the new even-smaller Fifth Avenue, a family in our church (back when I pretended to believe in such things) bought a bright red one with a white landau roof and thick whitewalls.
    It looked like a pimp-mobile.

    Wanna see a frameless quarter window?
    Every VW CC and Mercedes-Benz CLS

  18. Jason, I suggest you head over to the Porte Derriere, the tavern where rear door fetishists meet to discuss such matters. Broaden your world view beyond taillights. Just don’t ever mention the RX-7’s vestigial doorlet when the Coupers are in attendance. Those guys are always bruising for a fight with the Sedanistas.

        1. I always thought sedans should have 4 doors, making my BMW a coupe. My ’64 Corvair also has solid B pillars and it’s a coupe. Apparently the roofline matters more than the number of doors.

          1. My understanding of a sedan, in practical terms, is that you get an insulated trunk and a back seat that can hold adults. The Beetle was classified as a sedan back in the day, so was the 2002 and the Escort, as well as the Alfa 105.

            Usually, the thing that really separates a coupe is the purpose of the rear seats, if they’re for kids and emergencies only then it’s a coupe. Consider a 2-door Civic, it’s really a 2-door sedan as the wheelbase and rear legroom are the same as a sedan, there may be a slight loss of rear headroom depending on the generation, but if you really compare it with a Prelude or CR-Z, you can see that those have a substantially compromised rear seat.

            Some sedans are really short, and they achieve this by being very upright. Consider a Toyota Echo or BMW 2-series, they have their seats raised a little bit to make the occupants’ lower legs more vertical, enabling a comfortable fit in a shorter form-factor as feet don’t have to splay out forward.

            This is just a thought on it, there’s certainly a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that I haven’t or can’t quantify, but the number of doors is a somewhat reductive solution. There’s also a very contentious definition to coupe, because it was originally a style of roof rather than a whole body style, but that’s a whole other discussion.

        2. Wouldn’t that make the 911 a sedan? Same with a hardtop E-type, and even some 2-seaters like the Vantage. I think it has more to do with form factor than specific features.

  19. I’m so glad the long-term Model Y at work had something in common with a Malaise Era great (…soaked carpets from a frameless window not sealing properly).

    I really want to hear what this guy has to say about that Olds Ninety-Eight diesel now. The diesel! Gosh, that there’s downright exotic anymore. Also, I love Oldsmobiles.

      1. Oh my gosh, I just found that review. Reviewers got sent some proper turds back in the day! I definitely went down a rabbit hole, although I’m sad that channel didn’t have the Ninety-Eight diesel on it.

        1. What about the Cadillac Seville that GM apparently put back into the press fleet after using it as a training car for dealership mechanics? It had been taken apart and put back together multiple times and nothing in the interior was fitted right with squeaks and rattles everywhere, it’s like they didn’t care the slightest about making a good impression, even though you know south Florida was a major market for bustleback Sevilles

          1. Yep, very popular with a old people in Miami at the time. My grandparents lived there. My grandmother had a mid 80s 5th Ave. My grandfather taught at South Miami High, and noted that a lot of the young women there drove Eldorados (the smaller front wheel drive ones when they came out.)

        2. I’m so entertained by those reviews, I’ve definitely gone down that rabbit hole.
          It’s hilarious whenever he talks about good handling, or firm suspension, then they show the car wallowing around the cones in the slalom. Hilarious.
          And the number of defects in the cars, especially ones that were given for a car review, is unbelievable. Malaise indeed.

  20. to be fair, Mopars had issues with sealing glass from the mid ’60s onward, even peak Malaise era workmanship wasn’t really all that worse than what had been going for a long time

    2. This is truth. If anyone has any 1965 Plymouth Fury rear quarter panels for sale, please contact me.
      Literally every one I’ve ever seen is rusted above the rear wheels, and it’s known it’s from the rear roll down windows not sealing.

  21. This is definitely the most awkward attempt at putting a traditional formal roofline and landau top on a car too small for it, but it isn’t the only time Chrysler did something this dumb. The midsize M-Body Fifth Avenue had the C-pillar padded vinyl carried down into the door, blocking what could have been a window. It was the factory version of the stupid aftermarket roofs people put on Ford Contours and Mercury Mystiques in the 90s

    1. As did the 1967-1971 four-door Thunderbird, which had a center B-pillar, frameless doors (but with metal trim on the window glass) and a cut through the landau roof like the ’79 New Yorker, although the T-bird’s cut line was partially concealed by the landau bar.

    2. My parents (in Florida) had an early Mercury Sable (fancy Taurus) with the padded cloth roof. I was always quite annoyed that my rear window was sacrificed on the altar of hideous styling tropes. The front light bar was cool though.

    3. That’s because that section of the roof was a fiberglass plug to change the standard M body sloped rear window into a vertical rear window, the vinyl hides the butchery they did to the car.

  23. Who won the bet about that monstrosity getting approved for production? The designer who had their glorious idea hacked up or the engineer who had to make it work?

  25. In early seasons of Murder, She Wrote, Cabot Cove Sheriff Amos Tupper used the Dodge version of the R-body as his cruiser; multiple episodes showed the rear doors open, showing off the weird framed quarter window/frameless main window situation, akin to the Seville in the article since the cop version didn’t have the whole opera window thing going on.

    I think I’ve maybe only seen one R-body in real life, a New Yorker, and I know exactly where it is to this day because it hasn’t moved in well over a decade.

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