I've just had a look at the ch300imp.com website and read through the Ghia limo article. The only factual error I found was that there were two '59s built with the lift off plexiblas canopy. Once car was based at Chrysler Manhattan for visiting dignitaries and the other was used for the 1959 Royal Tour with Queen Elizabeth to celebrate the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway. I don't know the full history of this car, but probably 40 or so years ago, I saw it in a small "celebrity" car museum in Niagara Falls Ontario. Shortly after that the museum closed and I was told a wealthy farmer bought the car. No real confirmation on this but I did pick trail 25 years ago when I was contacted by a shop in Concord Ontario (northern suburb of Toronto). They were tasked with bringing the car back to life after it had suffered at the hands of its then current owner, Marilyn Lastman, wife of Mel Lastman, the then mayor of Toronto. Lastman owned a jewellry store and the idea was that couples who bought their rings there could have use of the car for their wedding. The car had sat parked outside behind the store. The plexiblas canopy cracked, leaked and basically made quite a mess of the interior. The shop that contacted me was doing the mechanical refurb on the car and he subcontracted to a trim shop in Concord staffed by old country Italian trimmers. When they dismantled the interior of the many of the panels had notes in Italian on the backs. The Lastman's wanted the car trimmed in vinyl or some such god-awful stuff, and the trim shop refused. The shop sourced the original material for the interior and redid it properly, even sourcing a new mouton carpet from the Detroit furrier. When the bill came due, the Lastmans refused to pay it and the trim shop, slapped a lien on the car. The owner of the mechanical shop arranged to be the only bidder on the lien auction and ended up with the car. Long story short, this fellow was in over his head on doing more restoration work on the car and it ended up at the Guild of Automotive Restorers in Bradford. They completed the work on the car and somehow gained 100% ownership of the car. It was displayed at Eyes On Design in Grosse Pointe the year after it was finished, and I understood it was sold (for about $115.000) to someone in the mid U.S. Years, later it turned up in the collection of a wealthy middle eastern (Prince? King?) where it resides in ariconditioned comfort along with about 200 other cars. So the likelihood that anyone in North America is ever going to see this car again, is somewhere between nil and zero.
As for the Chrysler Manhattan car, all I was ever able to learn is that the car fell into gross disrepair and was scrapped.
Last interesting side note. When the owner of the mechanical shop arranged to have the plexiglas canopy dealt with, he had the car flatbedded on a semi to the original shop that did that conversion work, Creative Industries in Detroit. I have yet to learn the details of how the canopies were made but it involves a process called "slush casting". And a unique feature of this process is that it cost LESS to make two than it did to make ONE.
Absolute last sidenote. Ghia charged Chrysler approximately $11,000 to do the conversion on a car. Creative Industries charged Chrysler $13,000 to convert the limo just to have the lift off canopy.
