On a normal day the gate is open and somebody wanders in. John Roman is on the floor of his Brooklyn shop wrestling a transmission up into a 1976 Datsun 280Z, and before he can ask, a buddy is down in the dirt next to him with his hands on the bellhousing. Nobody scheduled it. This is most of what Ground Level Garage is, and after eight years in Greenpoint it's less something Roman does than something he is.
The name is a play on a few things at once. He builds low cars, slammed street cars, ground-level stuff. It also means first floor in New York City, in the street, the opposite of a top-floor office with a view. "It's gritty," he says. "It's in the dirt." There are potholes all over the block and the roof leaks and the city keeps finding new ways to make it hard, alternate-side parking, the tickets, the walkable-city programs he watches roll out around him. He doesn't talk about any of that like it's the cost of doing what he loves. He talks about it like it's part of the point. "It's tough over here," he says, "but it reminds me of growing up. Making something out of that struggle is a beautiful thing."
What comes through the gate is mostly old and mostly Japanese. Datsuns and Toyotas from the mid-70s to the mid-80s, the occasional little Honda, a steady run of old Land Cruisers you could (and might) drive into the apocalypse. The Z started all of it. The look comes out of Showa-era Japan, the kaido racer and bosozoku stuff, and the reason it stuck is that it runs on the exact same current as everything else he was ever into. From Japan came a whole subculture built on the DIY ethos he came up on, and it spoke the language he already spoke. So he went all the way in. He wants the Cressida to read like it was lifted out of a late-80s issue of Young Auto, period-correct down to the tchotchkes on the dash. "Ninety-nine percent of people aren't going to notice that," he says. "But it matters to me." That's the tell. The effort goes where only he would ever find it. At that defines who he is.
He keeps the cars true to form, which is definitively not stock. Nothing he owns is stock. But the L-series in the Z has a whole pedigree behind it, and the idea of yanking it out for a crate motor to do a burnout actually offends him. "Why would you rip this legendary power plant out of it?" he says. "You're chasing something outside of the car. You want to be algorithmically relevant." He likes carburetors. He likes analog. "No matter what goes on, I don't need a computer to tune my car. If I'm in the middle of nowhere, I can figure my way out of any problem." Tuning one by smell and sound, the way he tells it, is the difference between holding the title and actually owning the thing. You learn how it runs and when it's happy, and that's the part that's yours. The history of the car is in the room with you whether you cop to it or not. "Have a little respect for that."
The shop runs like a clubhouse for working guys who would rather get under a car together than stand around a clean one. When a buddy got married, Roman spent the nights before in a Marine Park driveway in the dark, rebuilding the guy's Z so he could drive it to his own wedding. He throws permitted block parties where 40-some cars line the street and he does the cooking. A couple of years back two young brothers from Queens rolled up in an old safari Volvo they had just gotten running. It wasn't registered and it barely ran. "This is the sickest shit I ever seen," he remembers thinking. They burned the car down a year or two later. Didn't matter. They were the coolest guys at the party. The polished thing parked outside a Soho coffee shop to be photographed does nothing for him. "Missed me with that, dude it aint it," he says.
He does almost all of it with one set of hands, seven days a week, the way it has gone for most of his adult life. He has paid for every inch of it himself and only knows how to work that way, and he is wary of the version of success that would put him sales writing behind a desk instead of under a car. He has a mechanic's mind about the whole thing. When something isn't working there's a way through it, and when it gets hard you don't pivot, you dig in deeper. People have asked him over the years if it's worth it, why not sell a car, why not point the garage somewhere easier, and he doesn't really have an answer, because there's nothing underneath it to trade against. "It's always been my main thing," he says. "It's my purpose. If I didn't have this, I'd have no reason to be on this earth." He doesn't say it for effect.
The cars are all patina. He never polishes them. You don't really own one anyway, the way he sees it. It lived before you and it'll outlast you, and the most you get to be is the steward, the one who learned how it ran and kept it moving for whoever comes next. When he's gone, he figures, it won't be the cars on the street that say he was here. "It's what you did," he says. "And how you influenced the people around you and how you share the weight." And it happens on the floor, with whoever wandered in that day.
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