ON a hot Saturday afternoon, a grease-stained man in blue overalls walks out of the storeroom and shouts over the sales counter, “We nuh have that!” he bellows at the top of his voice ensuring that I get the message amid the boisterous horde of customers clamouring to be served.

It’s a familiar hustle and bustle of a Hagley Park Road autoparts store, and it’s the fourth consecutive one I’ve been to that doesn’t have the brake booster I need for my motor car. But unperturbed, I move on to the next shop on this auto strip, confident that I’ll get what I’m looking for.

With close to 100 motorvehicle-related businesses — new and used car dealerships, auto-parts stores, auto repair shops, automotive painting centres, et al — Hagley Park Road is the epitome of an auto district. So rich are the dynamics of the auto business on the thoroughfare, one can’t help but wonder about their origins.

“Hagley Park is probably the centre for everything concerning auto,” said Chris DaCosta, general manager of Honda dealership ATL Motors. “It’s an extremely well-travelled road; there’s actually no point in the day that it’s not busy, except on Sundays.”

ATL Motors, which offers new vehicle sales, servicing, genuine Honda parts and collision repair, has been etched at 47-49 Hagley Park Road — right in the heart of Kingston — since 1997. But the story of the street goes way beyond that.

Hagley Park Road adopted its name from a place known as Hagley Park Pen — the area, it is believed, was part of farming land during colonial Jamaica, used for the rearing of pigs, hence it was called a pig pen. It was a highly regarded residential area up to the late 1960s to early 1970s, when pockets of private commercial interests began to come on the scene — a few of them into auto-related services, such as Charles Moore, who set up his own transport centre on the street.

“We started the delivering of Gleaner to the Postal Department and throughout the metropolitan area,” noted the businessman about Moore’s Transport Services, which had its origins in 1967 at 32 Hagley Park Road, an address it still occupies today.

“We took over the corporate Area and the island,” added Moore.

Other pioneering automotive operations on Hagley Park Road were a garage run by renowned mechanic and former race-car driver Peter Moodie, and a car brokerage, Firm Auto, which was owned by the Myries.

By 1983, when the late Roal Mitchell relocated Mitchell’s Auto Supplies from Orange Street to Hagley Park Road, the street started gaining recognition for housing a few popular auto-parts providers – which today represent the bulk of the businesses on Hagley Park Road.

“Hagley Park Road gained its prominence with Mitchell’s – the ‘Partsman’,” declared Lyttleton ‘Tanny’ Shirley, who purchased Mitchell’s in 1994.

“Mitchell’s was one of the first major auto-supplies companies to come on Hagley Park Road – under Roal Mitchell’s stewardship,” he said.

Other notable auto-part dealers on the road at the time were Teddy’s, Beckford’s and Rapid’s Auto Supplies, the latter owned by Shirley’s brother, Clarence.

“They could’ve supplied most of the English parts, anything named Ford or Minis,” recalled Marc Fletcher, who was a burgeoning race-car driver at the time, when cars made in England were at the peak of its popularity.

The emergence of auto entities on Hagley Park Road, according to Shirley, was a transition that was forced because, at that time, most of the prominent auto-supplies places were on Spanish Town Road.

“Because of violence and traffic, people felt that it was more convenient not to go to Spanish Town Road,” he said, adding “Hagley Park Road was seen as more of an ‘uptown’ type of safe environment to shop and created that element of security and safety outside of the more robust and more insecure aspect of Spanish Town Road.”

Shirley was negatively impacted by the shift in the market personally, in regard to his own auto-parts interest on Spanish Town Road that was ironically called Hagley’s Auto Supplies — which Shirley acquired from the Changs, a Chinese-Jamaican family who started the business on Hagley Park Road but moved it to Spanish Town Road near Three Miles.

“Roal (Mitchell) started to enjoy a high level of acceptance on Hagley Park Road and it cut off our sales because of people being more comfortable on Hagley Park Road,” Shirley told Sunday Finance, disclosing that revenues were impacted by up to 40 per cent because of the market shift.

The development prompted Shirley to invest in the Hagley Park district in 1994, through the acquisition of Mitchell’s.

“When Roal wanted to come out of business, we saw it as an opportunity to buy the business from him because we were losing sales from persons not coming to Spanish Town Road,” revealed Shirley.

Mitchell wanted $110 million for the business as a going concern, Shirley offered $85 million, and they settled on $90 million.

At the same time, Government had liberalised the importation of motor vehicles, resulting in a flood of used cars into Jamaica. And the 1990s influx of motor vehicles, from Japan in particular, played a major role in reshaping Hagley Park Road, catalysing its transformation into the dynamic auto strip it is today.

Some of the older players were squeezed out because their product offerings weren’t in line with the new market demand.

“A lot of them were catering for the cars of the day like the European cars — the BMWs, Fords, Peugeots, etc — but they died a natural death when the Japanese industry came in and they were heavily involved with the European parts market and had a lot of stock out there,” said Fletcher. “I guess they didn’t have the sufficient working capital to divert to the Japanese industry.”

On the other hand, they were replaced by an array of new faces in all aspects of the industry — from car dealerships to auto-parts store to automotive painting shops — which would change the landscape of the street.

Daryl Vaz, the present information minister, was one of them. Vaz, well known for pioneering the used-car business, in 1993 imported the first 78 used cars from Japan and operated a dealership from the Homelectrix building he acquired on Hagley Park Road.

Established players from other parts of town, recognising the competitive advantage of being located there, were also streaming into Hagley Park as well.

“I moved on to Hagley Park on the 23rd of May, 1993,” stated Julius Innis, owner of Jap Auto Supplies, a pioneer in the Japanese auto-parts business.

“The major players at the time were there and we wanted to get in on the action… we tried to get somewhere centralised as well,” he stated.

New additions generated more interest in the strip, among consumers and businesses, Innis explained, and the influx just continued.

“It started to get very commercialised, because it was convenient for people to come to Hagley Park Road,” said the businessman.

The fierce competition on the strip led to businesses becoming more innovative in their operations, reflected in the array of impressively structured auto entities which dot the street. One doesn’t need to look further than the likes of ATL Motors, Alex’s Imports or Mitchell’s to get an idea of the hundreds of millions of dollars that is being invested in the auto operations there.

Shirley, for instance, spent US$3 million to develop what is arguably one of the most comprehensive auto centres anywhere in the world — including a clean, wellorganised air-conditioned usedparts section.

“In fact, we were one of the first companies on Hagley Park Road to start the renovation process to come out of this whole aspect of selling parts behind a grill counter,” declared Shirley.

“Everybody started to follow our own pattern of airconditioned places,” he continued. “We created that standard of excellence for auto parts services and Mitchell’s capitalised on it because it had a lot of land which was very rare at auto parts companies.”

And despite the fact that the country is in the midst of one of the worst economic crisis on record, the Hagley Park auto district is today as vibrant as ever, with planned new investments promising that there will even be more dynamism on the strip to come.

ATL Automotive, for instance, remains on target for a January 2011 deadline, for the launch of a 25,000-square-foot facility which will h2ouse ATL Autohaus brands on Hagley Park Road. The new impressive ATL Autohaus facility will be second to none in Jamaica. It will act as ATL Automotive’s premier agency offering sales services, repairs and parts for both Audi and Volkswagen vehicles (Honda Motors will continue to reside on Hagley Park Road as a stand-alone, fullservice dealership).

The addition of both Audi and Volkswagen will see the dealerships manned by a contingent of German-trained Grade A technicians working on a full-time basis.

Shirley, noting that the auto industry is driven by technology, envisions that auto-service providers in a few years will become more sophisticated. And this, he said, will be reflected in the operations on Hagley Park Road.

“It is a very buoyant and highly sophisticated area of discipline, particularly with the new technology that is coming into automotive cars that is actually accessed through aerospace technology and now filtered into the automotive industry where we soon are going to benefit from some of the diverse research into autoparts component,” said Shirley, adding “Certainly, you’ll see a lot of engineering and a higher level of appreciation for the complexity of the type of requirement to service a motor vehicle.”

Against this background, one can’t help but imagine what the district will be like in a few years or even a few months down the line.

“That’ll be $4,000,” a sales clerk told me later that Saturday afternoon.

I found my brake booster, albeit at the sixth store. And after an exhausting shopping experience, I’m happy that I’m finally leaving but mindful that I’m likely to return very soon to Hagley Park Road.