1968 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser time capsule. Buried in 1975 at Artpark in Lewiston, New York. The car is still buried today.

1968 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser time capsule. Buried in 1975 at Artpark in Lewiston, New York. The car is still buried today.

Somewhere in Artpark, the 108-acre state park in Lewiston, New York, is buried an Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser covered in tar and filled with 30 suitcases packed with consumer goods such as cigarettes, condoms, and magazines from Reader’s Digest to Playboy. It’s all likely turned to dust, however: the station wagon received its entombment almost exactly 41 years ago, in a grand ceremony organized by Ant Farm, the media art and architecture collective founded in San Francisco in 1968.

In 1999, Ant Farm did attempt to prepare “Citizens’s Time Capsule” for its scheduled public reopening, but the Environmental Transport Association had deemed the soil around the station wagon toxic.