Sylvan Avenue

[JHertzman@domain.elided]

In AD7-1400 Bob Abhalter writes "I'm still wondering about the 
Alfaromeoinc.com domain name. An earlier post said it was registered to Alfa 
Romeo Inc., 250 Sylvan Avenue, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Now, I'm 99 percent sure 
that WAS the address of ARI before the formation of ARDONA and the move to 
Florida. I'm pretty sure that there is no such office address or organization 
anymore and that there really hasn't been for many years. My own WHOIS lookup 
indicates that the domain was registered June 7, 1999. So why would Fiat or 
ARDONA register an obsolete name using an out of date address ten or more 
years after moving their offices and changing their name? And why does the 
phone number listed for Alfa Romeo Inc. have a Pasadena, California area code 
and a number in the same series as the Earthlink Offices? And who is Nat 
Modugno, anyway? Very strange."

Well, yes. I too had thought that ARI had morphed into ARDONA and moved to 
Orlando, etc. But a friend who knows far more about the post-purchase history 
than I really want to tells me that Ferrari N.A. has offices on Sylvan Avenue 
in Englewood Cliffs, (presumably the former ARI east-coast premises) and that 
on those Ferrari N.A. premises there is a company with the name "Alfa Romeo 
Inc." which had previously been housed in FIAT's Manhattan offices, along 
with FIAT Finance, and which now performs some administrative and financial 
services for FIAT. He says all of this is shown on the FIAT SpA annual 
reports. He does not say, but I would guess, that this "Alfa Romeo Inc." has 
minimal actual involvement in critical decision-making about the engineering 
and design of cars which I would consider to be logical descendants of those 
built by Jano, Satta, and the other great spirits which animated Portello and 
Arese in days of yore.

Whether ARI, the US company, actually ceased to exist and was later 
reincarnated, or whether it had a continuous existance as a piece of paper in 
a filing cabinet, seems of little import. There was once much more to Alfa 
Romeo than words on an organization chart, and some of the "more" that was 
there is, I strongly suspect, definitively gone.

John H.
Raleigh, N.C.

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