The days of wandering over acres upon acres of vehicles in junk yards has largely become a thing of the past. High scrap prices are to blame.
No, junkyards started disappearing long before the high scrap prices. Zoning laws, insurance regulations, EPA restrictions and "improvements" such as Lady Bird Johnson's Beautify America campaign have been killing them off for years. In the part of the country where I grew up we used to have a lot of junkyards but when Johnson started her Beautify American campaign in the mid 1960s they outlawed all but the two largest yards. Starting in the early 1970s, those two were open only to the auto repair shops and didn't even allow individuals in because of "insurance reasons". On the east side of Orlando there were still a lot of junkyards in the early 1980s but then the EPA started clamping down on them about oil leakage and dumping and possible ground water contaimination and that forced a lot of them out of business. Also they had a fire in one here and it was almost impossible to put out because of all the tangled metal that water wouldn't reach, burning tires, burning upholstery, etc and the oil saturated ground that actually burned for days. That caused the locals to enact tough new anti-fire ordanances that also forced many yards to close. Orlando is also a
prime tourist destination and they're very protective of their public image and I think that's also contributed more than a little justification to their decision to force out the remaining yards with stiff, new zoning ordinances.
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. I used to love to visit Howard Hammons place.