Dropped at airport -- now where?
Massport auction may supply a destination for vehicles left behind at Logan
There's a blue 1989 Buick LeSabre station wagon with a "Livin' Large" sticker on the back door and a blue teddy bear in the wheel well. If your taste runs to foreign, there's a 1987 Saab with faded MapQuest directions on the passenger's seat plotting a drive from Milford, N.H. to JFK Airport in New York.
Those are two of the 130 orphaned vehicles to be auctioned tomorrow by the Massachusetts Port Authority. But this is not an auction to find a bargain on that third car. This is an auction for parts and where buyers should be prepared to bring a tow truck -- many of the cars suffered the final indignity of vandalism on top of abandonment.
The stories behind how they came to be sitting in a fenced-in yard off Lovell Street in East Boston are as mysterious as the vehicles themselves. Each was abandoned -- for whatever reason -- in the vast parking garages at Logan International Airport, which currently have about 13,000 spaces for public use. The aiport will have 15,000 spaces when the central garage expansion is completed next year.
Most of the abandoned cars were simply left to take up space and gather dust, by thieves or owners who used the airport's far reach to leave their pasts and their rides behind.
Logan passengers have been known to leave a rental car in the garage if they are late to catch a flight, but it's also a dumping ground for an unusually large number of vehicles -- perhaps because so many cars, between 7,000 and 14,000, are parked there each weekday. It takes at least a month of nightly checks for Massport officials to suspect that a car might be abandoned.
Jack Hemphill, Massport's business general manager who oversees collection of these lost cars, said the agency tries to contact the owners with certified letters, registry searches, and help from State Police.
"Every car must tell a story," Hemphill said, "but we don't know it."
The owners of many of these 130 vehicles -- including a 1974 white
In one attempt to contact the possible owner of a red 1995 Dodge Neon based on papers seen inside the car, a man who answered the phone politely said he'd rather not discuss it.
Tomorrow's auction will be the largest Massport has held.
Most of the vehicles rolled off assembly lines in the late 1980s or early 1990s; many have more than 100,000 miles or even 200,000 miles showing on the odometers. Some, like the Porsche, are without keys. Some of the vehicles appear to have been lived in, with pots and pans and food still in the back seat.
"It's sometimes hard to understand why a nice vehicle would be abandoned, but that's not for us to determine and we need to get the vehicles off of the property," Hemphill said.
The auction takes place at 11 a.m. Prospective buyers are given two hours to check out the goods and look under the hoods before the vehicles go on the block.
Proceeds from the vehicle auction go to Massport, which sells each vehicle as is with no expressed or implied warranties.
And no test drives.
Mac Daniel can be reached at mdaniel@globe.com. 
