Raphael Orlove
If you are, say, a New York millionaire or billionaire looking to buy a collector car of car collecting’s greatest era – low-volume mid-century Italian sports cars – you will be shopping at one of a handful of boutique dealers in and around the city. You might breeze into Morton Street Partners in the Village, or maybe you take a short drive up to New Canaan to talk Ferrari Daytonas at The Cultivated Collector. When those shops need a car tested, or taken from “good enough” to “perfect,” they call Domenick’s.
The cars at the very apex of the classic car market present some interesting challenges. What do you do when it’s time to fix up a car that has no sibling, let alone a service manual? When its parts were milled by hand half a century ago?
“It’s not just you call the NAPA,” Santo Spadaro tells me as we step down to the basement garage he just refinished. “A lot of the parts don’t exist anymore.”
This is Domenick’s specialty. The little shop in White Plains is still family-run, with siblings Vera, Frank, and Santo continuing the operation their father started in 1961.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Around us are the most boutique of boutique cars, one of which is too rare to be mentioned or photographed. It’s in for work, and so few of these cars exist that anything more than a glimpse of a fender would reveal its identity. It’s hard to stay under the radar in a world this small.
The quality of cars that come out of such a tight operation is staggering. “There’s only four of us and our sister,” Santo says as we make our way back up to the shop area, where he is quickly called in different directions. Can he or his brother source a part from Europe? Can they repair what’s originally there, or will they have to make a replacement themselves?
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove It’s no surprise that vintage Ferraris and the like continue to pass through Domenick’s garage door. After all, Domenick’s has been working on them “since they were new,” Frank notes.
Past a pair of classic Lancias and next to a rally-ready Fiat 124 Abarth sits the shop’s small engine room. It’s packed. A head sits on one table, its valve seats getting lapped. A lathe sits across from it, to fabricate whatever can’t be fixed.
These challenges are the appeal. These are “not cars that just roll off the assembly line,” Santo says. “They were built by hand, by famous designers, driven by famous racers to famous victories.” Now it’s his hands that repair them. “There’s a kind of sympatico. A connection.”
“It’s one of the reasons I don’t want to expand. I’d be a desk jockey,” Santo adds. “That’s what I left.”
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Unlike Frank who was working here when he was eight, Santo wasn’t always in the family business. He worked a corporate job in advertising in nearby Stamford until his father had a stroke in ‘96. Through the early ‘90s, he had been easing in more hours at the shop, but he went from half-time to full-time “because all hell was breaking loose.”
His sister Vera has a similar story. Already retired from Wall Street, one day “someone called me that you’ll have to open the shop in the morning,” Vera says from her desk in the office. Santo was across the country on a vintage rally and Frank had a health scare. That was 2007. “I’ve stayed ever since.”
Vera admits that she “doesn’t know a thing about cars,” but keeps the shop organized with her finance background. She was an Associate Director in the Investment Banking division of Bear Stearns. For her, “It’s not about the cars. It’s the people.”
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove The siblings maintain a close bond between shop, car, and customer. For years, they would organize memorial drives in honor of their father. He worked six days a week, “till 10 or 11 o’clock at night,” says Frank, only taking time off on Sundays for a drive into the country. The memorial drives took a similar route, with dozens of owners looping back to one customer’s estate for lunch. The drives had a threefold purpose: they kept the memory of their dad alive, they kept their relationship with their customers close, and they kept their cars on the road.
Domenick’s held these rallies through 2019, until their host, a real estate agent during the dot-com boom who also had a website bought out for $60 million, passed away. They keep a small shrine in his honor by the door.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove For all of these rallies, the biggest challenge in keeping these cars running and driving has nothing to do with how they are made. It’s their value.
Many of these Italian classics have appreciated to the point where they are hardly cars anymore. A 250-series Ferrari was once an attainable car, somewhat old and obsolete. Now, the most expensive 250 GTOs set auction records in the tens of millions. The most affordable 250s rarely cross auction blocks for less than $200,000 today. Domenick’s is where cars like that come to get fixed. “You look under the car, or take it for a road test,” Frank says, “there’s a page and a half of comments.”
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Outside of the Spadaros, few people know what these cars are supposed to drive like. “Even mechanics don’t know,” Frank admits. “They think they were shitty then and shitty now.”
The most expensive cars to go through the shop can be the worst. “A hundred-point car will come into the shop,” Frank tells me from the office. “The tie rods are hand-tight! Every bolt on the suspension, hand tight. They don’t want to turn the wrench and risk scratching the paint.”
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove It’s the last 10-20% of the job, this crucial tuning, that transforms them from car-shaped objects into running, driving automobiles.
“Just putting it all together and not following through,” adds Santo, “You’re missing the whole point of the car.”
