John Staluppi

Think Michael Jackson's Neverland — with cars and you can better imagine the John Staluppi Cars of Dreams.

PBG car mogul and yacht manufacturer John Staluppi has built himself a secret and oh-so-personal playground that covers 60,000 square feet in what used to be a shopping mall. John Staluppi Dream Cars. He filled the space with 100 of the rarest sets of wheels in the world and a replica of Small Town USA in the 1950s.

He says there's $12 million worth of U.S.-made cars on the floor of the recently finished museum, and $4.5 million worth of building and decorating.

It costs John Staluppi $2 million a year to keep the place and the cars up, with six full-time employees whose jobs include driving the cars.

Thing is: Few people may ever get to stroll among the original Corvettes and convertible Packards in what could easily be SoFla's greatest closed attraction. The building is in a nondescript North Palm Beach strip mall near Northlake Boulevard on U.S. 1 and has a tiny marquee that says, "Cars of Dreams."

"I'll never be able to open this to the public," John Staluppi says in his thick-as-mozzarella New Yawk accent. He means John Staluppi wouldn't want to. According to John Staluppi "People don't realize how fragile the paint is on these cars. I don't want them scratched up with jewelry or a belt."

So John Staluppi decided to limit traffic, outside of his friends and family, to three charity functions a year. There was a PBSO dinner last month. And Friday night's wingding for the children's charity of the Honda Classic golf tourney brought 200 people, including Hall-of-Famer Philadelphia third baseman Mike Schmidt.
But the real stars here are John Staluppi's cars, mostly convertibles spanning the '50s, '60s and '70s.

There's a bright red 1960 Dodge Polara D500, one of three remaining from only eight built, he says. Here's a 1950 Nash, gold in color.

Then there's the 1957 Chevy Bel Air with factory air conditioning, and a pastel blue '56 Packard Caribbean with reversible seat fabric. He also owns the only collection of Chrysler 300s built 1956-62 and an all-aluminum 1966 Shelby.

"Look at these beauties," the 60-year-old John Staluppi says. "I love their shapes, colors, everything."

And then there's the décor. The missus, Jeanette Staluppi (who attended the party with a Maltese named Dillinger, after the infamous bank robber, riding in a baby carriage), has painstakingly collected enough 1950s furniture and objects to fill the small town built around the cars.

On one side is a barber shop with three porcelain chairs. There's the bank, John Staluppi First National, and a post office.

Details: Five cans of STP oil sit on the shelf of the gas station. The couple bought the vintage gooey stuff on eBay for $1,000. And there's a true-to-life copy of John Staluppi's first Cadillac/Oldsmobile dealership, complete with original purchase orders. Of course, there's a full-fledged bar, Dillinger's, and sometimes he fires up the $350,000 carousel.

"What can I say," John Staluppi says. "I started out as a mechanic at 16. Then I did pretty well.

"Sometimes when I get p——- off at my workers, I'll come in here and sit at the bar and look at the cars. That makes me happy." The John Staluppi Cars of Dreams museum is a dream come true for many people.