After 96 years, Mount Prospect without its Buick dealership

Joe Mitchell Buick-GMC has closed its doors at 801 E. Rand Road, Mount Prospect. The franchise has been purchased by Bill Sullivan Pontiac of Arlington Heights and operations have been moved to Sullivan's location at 777 Dundee Road.

The five acres Mitchell occupies on Rand Road will be sold or rented, according to Jim Mitchell, who bought the dealership from his father about 10 years ago.

"Business has been a struggle," Mitchell admitted. "We've had trouble making ends meet here because of key expenses like insurance and real estate taxes. Our Cook County real estate taxes have been going up 50 to 100 percent per year and that played a big part in our decision to sell."

Mitchell said it has been "impossible" to do business on the scale they needed to.

"Sales have not gone up 50 to 100 percent per year so something had to give. We are sad to be leaving but when you are in business, you have to make business decisions," Mitchell added.

General Motors has been encouraging consolidations of Buick, GMC and Pontiac dealerships for the last decade.

"This has been part of GM's grand scheme for a long time, but for us, it happened very quickly -- within a few months," said Ariel Szwec, general manager of Bill Sullivan Pontiac.

Mitchell explained that nationally, GM wants to go to market at one location with all three brands. Their plan was for Mitchell or Sullivan to buy the other out, and then combine at the Dundee Road location, which is considered the better location.

GM could not, by Illinois law, force the dealerships to combine. They had to wait until the dealers were willing, which happened this spring, Mitchell said.

"My family owns this real estate and I would have to vacate it either way, so I just decided to let Jeff Sullivan buy me out," he explained.

The people at Sullivan are "extremely excited and enthused" about the merger, Szwec said. They also hired about a half-dozen Mitchell employees, he added.

For Mount Prospect, the closing of the dealership means more than the loss of a business.

When Mitchell closed its doors Thursday it marked the first time in 96 years that Mount Prospect was without its historic Buick dealership, which opened at 2 W. Busse Ave. in 1912 and was originally known as Busse Buick.

"Obviously, since this dealership had its roots in the old Busse Buick, this is a lost piece of history for Mount Prospect," said Mike Janonis, village manager of Mount Prospect.

He added it will also be a sales tax loss for Mount Prospect in the "low six figures."

"Because the village has such a diverse revenue stream, this won't be a crushing blow. But when the economy is slow, any loss hurts," Janonis added.

According Mount Prospect Historical Society records, the idea behind Busse Buick was born in 1908, when William Busse walked past a Buick dealership on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. He was fascinated by the car in the window, which he and a business associate jointly bought.

Two years later Busse upgraded to a car with a larger engine and was so impressed he contacted the manufacturer and offered to become a local agent. He was told that dealers in Chicago had an agreement covering all of Cook County, so it was not possible.

But two years later when he was finishing the roof of his hardware building, a stranger climbed up the ladder and introduced himself - he was a Buick representative and had come to offer Busse a charter for a local agency. Busse signed the papers while still on the roof.

William Busse's heirs sold the dealership to John Mufich in 1966, who moved it to a larger area along Road Road and renamed it Mufich Buick. In 1970 Mufich took on his staff member, Joe Mitchell, as a partner and Mitchell began a lengthy buy-out of the dealership.

It was a Buick-Opel dealership when the famous elephant first took up residence in the parking lot.

"Opel had an ad which featured an Opel Cadet in a tug of war with a live elephant to show how powerful the car was," Mitchell said. "So they rented and then purchased the elephant as a promotion ... and it became a fixture here."

Mufich completed the sale to Mitchell in 1980 and it became Joe Mitchell Buick, the name it retained until Thursday.

"It is impossible not to feel nostalgic," Mitchell said Friday, looking around the empty showroom. "It is strange to see the building emptying and to look out at an empty parking lot."