Raphael Orlove
Stepping in off the cobblestone street in Greenwich Village, the first car in the door at Cooper Classic Cars is a 3.5-liter Mercedes-Benz convertible. It is stately, almost plain for what it is, but exquisitely well-made. To an ordinary observer, it’s just an old Mercedes like any other. To a trained eye, it is a remarkably rare classic. Only produced from the end of 1969 to the start of 1971, it was the top-of-the-line V8 model from the peak moment for Mercedes quality. It is a high point, the end of an era.
“Do you know that car?” Elliot Cuker, owner and founder of Cooper Classic Cars asks from the lofted office overlooking the gallery-like space. “1971, only made for one year. They made 1,200 of them. I used to have three of them in this showroom. I still have one now.”
There was a time when these cars could be bought on the cheap. There was a time when they flew under the radar. But that time is gone. So strong of a cult following do these cars have that Mercedes started factory-restoring them. For close to $800,000 you can buy one completely overhauled from Brabus.
“At one point I was charging $200,000 for one,” Cuker says. “People said I should be committed.”
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Cuker, now in his early 80s, maintains an aura of effortless relaxation. His silver hair is still a messy mop, his face often bends to a wry smile. He is very casually stylish, the hardest kind. His glass coffee table is supported by a sculpture made of two right fenders off two 1951 Bentleys. Atop it sits a box of Cohiba cigars.
Not unlike The Cultivated Collector in New Canaan, CT, Cooper Classic Cars survives by always knowing what car is a steal today and a future classic tomorrow. And not unlike Miller Motorcars in Greenwich, Cooper Classic Cars thrives as a tastemaker.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove “I made the market for certain cars,” Cuker says. “In the ’80s, I made the market for the XKE Jaguar.” The XKE is one of the most surefire and well-established classics of the ’60s, the peak sports car of the peak of the sports car era. But the E-Type was a high-volume model with a long production run, and there was a time when it was merely an old car like any other. “I was buying them at $12,000, $13,000. At the New York Auto Show, I had about 12 of them. I sold them for $85,000 each.” Cuker explains that it’s not so much that he has a particular ability to pick out upcoming hot cars, it’s simply that he likes what he likes and buyers follow him. “I just love beautiful things. And I follow my intuition.”
“The latest was the 560SL,” Cuker claims of the long-running Benz convertible of the disco era. “I realized, it still has that classic feel,” Cuker says, but it could still be a car you hop into and drive to California. It is as modern as vintage cars get. Their rise in the market has been meteoric over the past five or 10 years. “I was buying them for $10- to $15,000,” Cuker says. Nice ones today can trade for 10 times that, as tracked by Bring a Trailer.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Getting in on the ground floor is how Cuker built Cooper Classic Cars. There are only eight cars here and five more in a secondary space across the street. Cuker bought the building in the ’70s when he lived around the corner in a four-bedroom apartment. His rent was $125 a month. (At $75,000 a month, a four-bedroom townhouse in Greenwich Village today rents for about that much every hour and a half.) “I was the first luxury business in the Village,” Cuker claims, having set up operations here in 1976 when the neighborhood was starting to fill up with artists like him. How he afforded to buy that building as a broke and underemployed actor is a long and wonderfully New York story Cuker tells. It involves a friend fleeing the country, a Rolls-Royce, Studio 54, and the composer of The Wiz.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove While sitting for this interview, a steady beat of people stops at the all-glass garage door that makes up the front of Cooper Classic Cars. They shroud their eyes to look in against the bright sun outside. They knock and point, looking past the sign that advertises “by appointment only.” Sitting inside the showroom feels like standing inside a flower, watching approaching bees.
Cuker prides himself on 60-70% of the cars here being sold sight unseen. Deals are made on Cuker’s advice as much as on his stock and reputation. “Last month I sold a million-dollar car without him ever seeing it,” Cuker says, adding that three months ago it was the same deal for a car at $800,000. “My word being the leader tells them something.”
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Cuker acts not so much as a supplier of classic cars to a hungry market of wealthy New Yorkers. He acts as a style guide, leading them to the right car.
“A guy will come in and say ‘I’m looking for an Austin-Healey,’” says Cuker. “I’ll ask him, ‘Why?’” A buyer might think that they want a particular car, but not know how much maintenance it requires, if it only takes hard-to-find parts, or if it’s a nightmare to drive. It’s no surprise in this echelon of the car world, where image so rarely meets reality. After all, “these cars are all about illusion,” Cuker muses.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove What Cooper Classic Cars does is not sell you the car that you think you want. It’s selling you the car that you need. You might not even be aware of it yet. It might only be on the radar of someone in the know, someone who can sniff out a smart buy before anyone else, someone with an eye for style. That’s something Cuker has better than anyone else.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Cooper Classic Cars
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Cooper Classic Cars
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Cooper Classic Cars
