Lifestyle

The European Heir Restoring Forgotten American Cars to Glory

Published

7 months ago

September 1, 2025

The European Heir Restoring Forgotten American Cars to Glory

Part passion project, part playground, the NB Center for American Automotive Heritage, founded by Nicola Bulgari, has facilities to service and showcase his collection of American cars from the early to mid 1900s.

A giant screen still towers over the site of the former Boulevard Drive-In Theater, a sprawling complex ringed by low-rise buildings in an industrial section of Allentown, Pa. For several decades in the middle of last century, it and other drive-ins showcased the might of America’s auto industry. The theaters — along with drive-through banks, pharmacies, groceries, liquor stores and dry cleaners — were both symbols of how cars were shaping popular culture and places to see all varieties of domestic vehicles.

The Boulevard Drive-in closed in the 1980s, after about 40 years in operation. But visitors to the site today will notice signs of automotive life. Its hilly landscape has been paved with miles of narrow, curving roads and there is now an old-timey Sinclair Oil gas station on the premises, complete with a glass-tank pump and a sign that flashes the company’s dinosaur logo.

The infrastructure supports what the old drive-in has become: a temple to American cars from the early to mid 1900s.

Called the NB Center for American Automotive Heritage, the private museum was founded about a decade ago by Nicola Bulgari, the 84-year-old vice chairman of Bulgari, the Italian luxury brand that his grandfather started in Rome in 1884. (In 2011, the Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy conglomerate took control of Bulgari in a multi-billion-dollar deal; in 2023, Mr. Bulgari was convicted of insider trading with LVMH stock in France and fined about $1.4 million.)

Vehicles are kept in temperature-controlled facilities and fueled at an old-timey Sinclair Oil gas station that was transplanted to the premises.

The NB Center, in which Mr. Bulgari has invested at least $10 million, has about 200 vintage cars from his collection (another 100 are in storage in Italy). Nearly all of the vehicles were built between the 1920s and the mid-1950s, in the middle of America, for the middle of the market. There are Chryslers, Chevrolets, Nashes, Oldsmobiles, Studebakers and, most abundantly, Buicks.

Mr. Bulgari knows each of the vehicles by make, year, specification — and often by purchase date and location, too. He rattled off the bona fides of several cars on a recent tour of the center: They included a 1934 Buick 96S with “a smooth reliable engine that is unparalleled,” as he put it; a 1941 Nash with a rear seat that converts into a bed; a 1948 Buick “woody” station wagon with an ash-and-mahogany body.

There was also a 1934 Chrysler Airflow Coupe, a model emblematic of the aviation-inspired trend toward streamlined automobile design. (Its developers included Orville Wright.) “From 1930 to 1934, a huge change occurred in design, when cars went from being a box, to smoothing down,” Mr. Bulgari said.

He has purchased most of the cars from sellers around the world. But Mr. Bulgari has also received some from donors who share his passion for a genre of automobiles that is prized less by collectors than cars from luxury European brands like Bugatti or Rolls-Royce.

“People ask me, ‘Why don’t you collect Ferraris?’” Mr. Bulgari said, noting that his older brother Gianni used to race a Ferrari 250 GTO in the mid 1960s. “My answer is there are too many Ferrari collectors already. They don’t need me.”

He feels that the cars he collects do. Mr. Bulgari sees his automotive center as preserving what he calls “the history of the greatest era of the American automobile.”

Nicola Bulgari in a 1935 Buick 96S Sport Coupe, one of his favorite cars in his collection.

While not currently open to the public, the center has hosted car clubs, philanthropic organizations, researchers and students for tours and events. Like other museums, it will loan out its contents. A 1934 Nash Ambassador from Mr. Bulgari’s collection recently appeared in the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance auto show, where the car won a second-in-class ribbon. Other cars or components have been borrowed by the Museum of Modern Art and the Frick Collection.

Though the types of vehicles Mr. Bulgari collects are from a time when automakers in the United States made significant design and engineering advancements, they have little material value today. They generally sell for mid-five-figure prices (about the average cost of a new car) and restoring one can easily cost five times as much.

That’s largely why “the survivability of those cars is very low” compared with that of blue-chip models preferred by collectors, said Jonathan Klinger, 43, a vintage automobile specialist who spent years working with classic cars at the insurance company Hagerty before becoming the NB Center’s executive director last year.

Mr. Bulgari’s car collection may be less famous than Jay Leno’s and less rarefied than Ralph Lauren’s, but it has a distinct theme, something that Ken Gross, an automotive historian, author and curator, said is essential to any good collection.

“I personally think what Bulgari has done is wonderful because many of those cars were, if not neglected by collectors, just not paid much attention to,” Mr. Gross added. “Their restoration gives you a glimpse into some cars that you might not necessarily see anywhere else.”

A speedometer calibration machine, top left, is used to adjust the accuracy of analog dashboard gauges at one of the center’s workshops.

Mr. Bulgari’s fascination with American cars started in childhood, around the time the Boulevard Drive-In opened in Allentown. “I first saw American cars in 1946 in Lugano, Switzerland,” he said. He was five years old and World War II had just ended. “I don’t have to describe what Rome was like in 1946, after the war,” Mr. Bulgari continued. “It was scary. So it was a bit of a shock to see these magnificent cars.”

He purchased his first Buick — a toy car — that same year. Not long after, in 1953, he went to watch the Mille Miglia, a 1,000-mile semiregular road race in Italy that first took place in 1927. He was 12, and although the race featured Porsches, Jaguars, Mercedes-Benzes, Aston Martins, Ferraris and Maseratis, Mr. Bulgari recalled dreaming only of seeing a 1953 Chrysler, one of the few American cars in the race.

“American cars had something style-wise that European cars never had,” he said. “And because of strong competition and a growing market, their engines, transmissions and suspensions were so advanced,” he continued, almost breathlessly. “And the metallurgy — they were constantly working on finding better materials, higher quality, longer lasting.”

To maintain his cars, Mr. Bulgari has brought a handful of small car-restoration businesses to the center, acquiring them in deals that included their equipment and employees (no jobs were lost in the process). The businesses include the former Hyde Villa Machine Shop, which operated in Reading, Pa., for more than 50 years before its owner, Rich Olsen, sold it to Mr. Bulgari two years ago. “We brought in everything — boring machine, crankshaft grinder, milling machine,” Mr. Olsen, 72, said.

A so-called three-olives machine, bottom left, named for the martini garnish it resembles, is used to fabricate fenders and trunk lids.

Keith Flickinger, the NB Center’s curator and chief operating officer, sold his business, Precision Motor Cars in Allentown, to Mr. Bulgari in 2015, after years of working on various restoration jobs for him. “I used to have dozens of projects from dozens of clients,” Mr. Flickinger, 62, said. “Now I have dozens of projects, but just one client.”

Mr. Flickinger saw folding his business into the NB Center as a way to preserve it, he added, while “preserving American automotive history and mentoring younger craftspeople” like the center’s student interns. They have come from the Pennsylvania College of Technology, Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., and McPherson College in McPherson, Kan., the rare American university to offer a four-year degree in car restoration. Amanda Gutierrez, McPherson College’s vice president for automotive restoration, said the center “has become a valuable educational partner, applying and expanding skills students have developed.”

Jon Haring, 48, the center’s automotive restoration manager, started working with cars as a teenage apprentice to Mr. Flickinger. Now he spends his days getting Mr. Bulgari’s vehicles in perfect running order — a process that can take as long as two-and-a-half years for a single car, partly because the period-correct parts they can require often have to be made from scratch.

Cars are maintained by a full-and part-time staff of 19 people, some of whom sold their small restoration businesses to the center in deals that included their equipment.

Charts tracking the progress of restoration work are posted near the entrances to the center’s workshops. The projects are myriad and often arcane: Creating handmade wooden wheels in the style of a 1920s Studebaker with the help of local Amish wheelwrights, for instance, or producing floor mats like those in a 1930s Nash by cobbling together ribbed rubber, casting a silicone mold and pouring in urethane. “It took about 40 hours to make the mats,” Mr. Haring said.

Brad Danish, an upholstery technician, started working full-time at the center in 2015. He had previously spent much of his career working out of the garage of his home in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Using a range of industrial sewing machines and custom-made components, Mr. Danish, 66, has stitched seats, door panels, headliners and carpets.

His craft is exemplified in the restoration of the leather seats in Mr. Bulgari’s 1939 Lincoln Zephyr convertible, which was believed to be the only model of its kind in original condition when Mr. Bulgari bought it for $60,000 in 2016. By then, the leather upholstery had petrified and the stitching had decomposed. Mr. Danish removed, soaked and softened the hides before reupholstering the seats by sewing through their existing stitching holes. That level of reverence to original details, he said, sets “a standard for future restorations of similar vehicles.”

Brad Danish, top left, an upholstery technician, stitching a wool-broadcloth covering for the front seat of a 1942 Buick Super Sedanette.

Mr. Bulgari said that another goal of the NB Center and its work is to ignite in others the same passion he has for the cars he collects. “What I’m trying to create is something that is contagious, that people understand, and then, on their own, they’re trying to save the cars of this time as well,” as he put it. “What is important is that people get inspiration. Even if they do one car in a lifetime, they save a piece of history.”

Some who have been to the site have taken up Mr. Bulgari’s cause. Johnathan Trumbo, 25, and Anthony Maguschak, 23, two mechanics at the center, now each own early 20th-century American cars. Mr. Maguschak, who lives in the Lehigh Valley, bought and has been rebuilding a 1939 Buick Special. “I absolutely credit Mr. Bulgari and this place with my interest in old Buicks,” he said.

As for Mr. Trumbo, who also lives in eastern Pennsylvania, he bought a 1931 Ford Model A pickup truck. “My friends all have their things — they’re into computers or electronics,” he said. “This is my thing. And they think it’s cool.”

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Lifestyle

‘The Comeback’ is back. That’s something to Cherish

Published

4 hours ago

March 29, 2026

Press Room

‘The Comeback’ is back. That’s something to Cherish

Lisa Kudrow as Valerie Cherish in The Comeback.

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Consider Valerie Cherish, the perennially desperate-to-be-seen, desperate-to-be-loved Hollywood C-lister played by Lisa Kudrow. Valerie, bless her, reenters our collective lives once every decade, like the census.

And like the census, her return always assumes the form of an appraisal, a ruthless and clear-eyed taking of stock. In The Comeback‘s original 2005 season, Valerie donned a cupcake costume and pratfalled her way through the rise of reality television, starring in both a corny sitcom and its making-of documentary. In 2014, a second season found Valerie headlining a prestige HBO series about that sitcom, auguring the fusillade of high-end, self-satisfied streaming dramedies that were about to pummel an unsuspecting populace into submission.

In this third season, she’s still out here hustling. Sure, she’s got an Emmy under her belt, and she’s been booked and busy, but there are signs of trouble — she and her husband (Damian Young) have downsized from their Brentwood mansion to a West Hollywood apartment. Her publicist-turned-manager (Dan Bucatinsky) seems even more checked out than baseline. She’s hired a social media consultant (Ella Stiller) and has even started (ominous chord, shudder) … a podcast.

As we meet her, she’s older, wiser but still essentially Valerie: Blithely optimistic, hungrily opportunistic. She’s still desperate for attention — but the precise nature of the attention she’s craving these days has subtly but significantly shifted. It’s no longer enough for Valerie to be seen; now, she wants — expects, demands, even — to be heard.

She remains ridiculous, thank God. And Kudrow once again imbues her with the physicality that has come to define Valerie’s essential self: She’s still going through life nodding like a bobblehead, still punctuating just about every sentence with a “right?” or a “yeah?” or a “y’know?,” because it’s a learned response. If the world refuses to affirm her in any way — and somehow it continues to find endlessly novel ways to do just that — then she’ll just affirm her own darn self, yeah? Right?

But something happens in the first episode of the new season that efficiently signals how much has changed for Valerie. The setup is classic The Comeback: She’s agreed to star as Roxie in Chicago on Broadway (after receiving assurances that her choreo will be the “dumbed down, Real Housewives version”). Rehearsal isn’t going great — her director and fellow dancers are mean, catty and dismissive (apart from one gay guy, whose words of praise Valerie seeks out like a homing missile — which checks out).

What happens next is quietly remarkable, given the Valerie Cherish we’ve come to love/cringe-in-sympathy-with over The Comeback‘s previous seasons. She doesn’t chirpily ignore their insults and blithely soldier on. She doesn’t try to excuse and minimize their bad behavior so she can take advantage of the opportunity they’re affording her. No, she calls them out, and she quits. (More accurately: She finds a ready, contractually viable excuse to quit — same difference, I’d argue.)

This isn’t the Valerie we used to know. When an opportunity to star in an AI-written sitcom arises, she doesn’t knock over furniture to lunge at the chance, as she would have before. She refuses (at first), she seeks assurances that actual writers will be involved (they will, sort of), and she steps up as the show’s executive producer as soon as it becomes clear she’s the only one involved who cares about the cast, the crew and the quality of the show itself.

There remain plenty of opportunities for Kudrow to make us laugh at Valerie, but as the season progresses, we find ourselves rooting for her more than ever. That’s because Kudrow has altered Valerie’s fuel mixture a bit. She’s always been acutely self-aware, she’s always known when she’s being disrespected, but the Valerie of seasons one and two was perfectly content to swallow other people’s low opinions of her if it meant she got some time in the spotlight.

Now, that self-awareness is matched to something besides her default, pathologically sunny perseverance; it’s married to defiance, and to action.

She stands her ground against a costume designer (Benito Skinner) who sees her as camp and nothing more (yet another of The Comeback‘s knowing digs at its rabid gay fanbase). She agrees to play nice with a network executive (Andrew Scott) until she, very publicly, doesn’t. And when her dour husband starts flailing on his own reality show, Valerie draws on her vast reserves of experience on both sides of the camera to show him how it’s done.

But a self-actualized Valerie affects the show’s comedic chemistry, and there are times when the season can’t quite manage to sustain its satiric bite. On two occasions, the show’s pitched disdain for Hollywood phoniness and hollow ambition falters, and something akin to sincerity peeks out from behind the mask. In one, a beloved real-life Hollywood comedy legend delivers a short monologue to Valerie about why AI can never replace real comedy writers, because comedy needs broken people. In another, a cast member from The Comeback‘s first season returns simply to assure Valerie that she is a good person, a wonderful person, and that she is in no way in the wrong.

On both occasions, seasoned viewers will be patiently but eagerly awaiting the turn, the rug-pull, the reveal that such abject, wet-eyed earnestness will of course get swatted down, because this is The Comeback. But the turn never comes, the rug remains firmly in place and we are left to grapple with the knowledge that we’ve just been exposed to the creators’ true intent, delivered with a gravid plainness, without anything even resembling the gimlet-eyed take we’ve come to, well … cherish.

But you know what? Fine. Who knows if Valerie will return in ten years’ time to once again Cassandra us all about the state of the entertainment industry? Who knows, in point of fact, if there’ll be an entertainment industry for her to return to? I forgave those moments of uncharacteristic ingenuousness because I managed to convince myself they felt valedictory, triumphant — a few discordant bars within Valerie Cherish’s swan song.

Which, as viewers of The Comeback’s definitive, beloved, iconic Season 1 finale will remember, is “I Will Survive.” Because it could never be anything else. Y’know?

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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Lifestyle

They transformed a historic bar into a fantasy forest for all of L.A.’s witches

Published

5 hours ago

March 29, 2026

Press Room

They transformed a historic bar into a fantasy forest for all of L.A.’s witches

Hear the name the Witch’s Cottage and you might conjure a mystical vision. And inside the new North Hollywood space, here there be witches, yes. But that’s just the start of it.

In one area of the two-story cafe, restaurant and bar, constellations beckon. A guide to crystals calls forth in another. An azure booth is flanked by an abstracted mermaid sculpture, and elsewhere howling wolves are engraved into the bar tops.

Witch’s Cottage co-founder Celina Lee Surniak, left, with investor/partner Ana Lovelis and co-founder Danielle Ozymandias. The three envisioned a welcoming space that views the world through a magical lens.

Hidden wonders are everywhere. Circle the cottage’s hand-constructed tree trunks, and maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll spy a tiny door hiding a little witch. Sit at one of the tables, and don’t be surprised to hear the sounds of birds chirping from the man-made trees. Branches spring forth from paintings and every nook is a nod to something born of a fable.

A decade-long vision of the founders, the Witch’s Cottage has transformed the old Federal Bar into a colorful, whimsical fairy-tale-like forest of a gathering spot. A place where one can come for the fantasy, and stay for the chicken etouffee and the Hex Breaker, a tiki-style, rum-heavy drink for grown-up sorcerers.

“I wanted this to feel lived in,” says Danielle Ozymandias, who dreamed up the space with business partner Celina Lee Surniak, a fellow creative who like Ozymandias very much identifies as a witch. “I wanted this to be a visual feast because I think maximalism is just so interesting. That may be the ADHD talking, but I knew I wanted a lot.”

The dining room of the Witch's Cottage aims for a fantasy forest-inspired look.

LOS ANGELES, CA -- FEBRUARY, 2026: The Witch's Cottage in North Hollywood, California on Friday, February 20, 2026. (Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

While they certainly designed the Witch’s Cottage to be family-friendly, Surniak and Ozymandias say part of their creative intent was to bring joy to adults.

“Everybody tries to shame you,” Surniak says. “Like, ‘You can’t buy that coffee. Save your money.’ No, let them have the coffee they really love. Let them get that annual pass to Disneyland. Let them have a weekly night at the movies, even if they go alone. The world is so weird right now. What we can do is find joy in tiny things.

A fairy at a media preview for North Hollywood's new Witch's Cottage.

“Being able to give adults the opportunity to say ‘I’m a fairy,’ is the best feeling ever,” Surniak continues. “And it’s not just at Renaissance fairs. Be a fairy here.”

Or be anyone. A sign near one of the restaurant’s restrooms makes it clear it doesn’t matter which one guests use. It asks that they simply wash their hands. “You can walk in as a witch, or a dragon, or just a FedEx worker,” Ozymandias says. “There’s no judgment.”

The Witch’s Cottage had its grand opening this weekend, and the community immediately responded with lines out the door. That wasn’t entirely surprising — the project was built by a collective. More than 200 volunteers donated more than 3,000 hours to bring the space to life, and the two founders attracted more than 100 investors via an online crowd-funding campaign that raised more than $167,000.

“We’re regular people,” Surniak says. “We don’t have a lot of money. We don’t have a nest egg. We don’t own property. If we were going to do anything, we would need help.”

Surniak says within three days of creating their campaign, they found an angel investor who offered them the funds to secure the building. Other investors followed, including Ana Lovelis and her husband Kenny Enea, known in the area for the elaborate haunted houses they have hosted at their home. The two joined as creative partners and helped with construction. Lovelis says she recognized in the Witch’s Cottage a similar outlook on life as hers. She recalled once years ago dating someone who had a skeptical and practical view of the world.

“And then there was me, being like, ‘That butterfly is a sign from my grandma,’” Lovelis says. The Witch’s Cottage, she says, is reflective of viewing the world through a magical lens. At a time of much stress for many, such a place may be needed. As Lovelis says, “What’s the harm?”

The Witch's Cottage is a two-story space that serves as a cafe during the day and a restaurant at night.

Surniak still has a day job, working as a stunt and intimacy coordinator on theatrical and Hollywood productions. Ozymandias, who previously worked in the local theater world, is focusing primarily on the Witch’s Cottage at the moment, helping to devise recipes and ensure the bakery can accommodate as many dietary restrictions as possible.

Beyond new menu items, there’s more in the works, including community events like sound baths, comedy nights and classes on composting, native plants and parenting. Or even some workshops that are more lighthearted, such as a hoped-for night on how to make a broom.

Hidden behind the upstairs bar is what’s called the Tempered Flask Tavern, and it’s an elaborate tabletop role-playing game room. Here, one will find a smoke-puffing dragon, but also digital windows that game masters can use to trigger various effects. A long table sits at its center, flanked by a knight, a digital fireplace and weaponry. Not open yet, the plan is for the room to be rented out by the hour.

Though Surniak and Ozymandias say they’ve been building vision boards for more than a decade of what the spot could look like, recent cultural shifts gave them the confidence that the timing was right. They point to “Stranger Things” and how it spawned a conversation around “Dungeons & Dragons,” or the success of Disney+ series “Agatha All Along.” More locally, they watched the rise of a game-focused bar such as the Roguelike Tavern, which is relocating to Studio City, as well as the news that experiential art firm Meow Wolf would be building an exposition in the city.

Taken as a whole, they felt bolstered that North Hollywood could support a heavily themed cafe, a home for those who have rolled a 20-sided die, once looked up the meaning of the Tower card or just enjoyed a viewing of “The Lord of the Rings.”

But one need not know the inner workings of RPGs, tarot or Middle-earth to feel at home in the Witch’s Cottage. This is a space, after all, for anyone who has ever been touched by a fairy tale, dreamed of the fantastical or wanted to believe in the power of wishing upon a star.

LOS ANGELES, CA -- FEBRUARY, 2026: The spread at The Witch's Cottage in North Hollywood, California on Friday, February 20, 2026. (Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Views from inside North Hollywood’s the Witch’s Cottage.

So spend a little time in the Witch’s Cottage, and maybe you’ll start to imagine that cocktail is a potion, and those deviled eggs did in fact hatch from a dragon. Diners may debate between the “iron forged fondue melt” (a patty melt) or the “meze heartwich” (a white bean purée on sourdough), but childlike wonder is the specialty of the house.

“Everybody is somebody’s kid,” Ozymandias says. “And I just want a safe space for people’s kids. Even if you’re 50, or 80, you’re my kid. I want you to feel loved, and to have a cup of something warm or magical. I want you to know that whatever is outside those doors, when you’re in here, I got you.”

Lifestyle

‘Wait Wait’ for March 28, 2026: Live in Savannah with D.W. Moffett

Published

16 hours ago

March 28, 2026

Press Room

Actor, director, chair of film and television department, SCAD, D.W. Moffett speaks on stage during Rising Star Award presentation to “Star” on Day Three of aTVfest 2017 presented by SCAD at SCADshow on February 4, 2017 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for SCAD)

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This week’s show was recorded in Savannah with host Peter Sagal, judge and scorekeeper Alzo Slade, Not My Job guest D.W. Moffett and panelists Adam Burke, Shantira Jackson, and Joyelle Nicole Johnson. Click the audio link above to hear the whole show.

Who’s Alzo This Time

Flotus and Robotus, Ineligible Bachelorette, and a Change of Season

Panel Questions

Fold-out Coach

Bluff The Listener

Our panelists tell us three stories about a hot new dining destination, only one of which is true.

Not My Job: Actor, director, and chair of the film and television department at SCAD, D.W. Moffett, answers our questions about melees

Actor D.W. Moffett, part of the cast of One Battle After Another, plays a game called “Lots of Battles All At Once.”

Panel Questions

Hairless Whisper, Signing Off

Limericks

Alzo Slade reads three news-related limericks: Buns on the Runway, Constructive Play, Getting Work Done at Work.