34th Annual Belmont Shore Car Show

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The builders start rolling in around six in the morning, staging their machines while the street is still empty, on a beach-town main drag that has been closed to traffic for the occasion. Which sounds like a small thing until you see it.

Fourteen blocks. More than seven hundred vehicles. Hot rods, classics, customs, and at least one climb-aboard helicopter parked incongruously among all that chrome. It is free, it is on foot, and it is really a block party wearing a car show's clothes — owners in lawn chairs, ready to narrate an entire restoration to anyone who slows down enough to ask a single question.

Second Street in Belmont Shore, Long Beach, on a Sunday morning in September.

Go if you have ever slowed down for a beautiful old machine. The people who built these have been waiting all year for somebody to ask them about it.