Having just written about libraries I will now turn my attention to gasoline stations. In my teen years I spent more time in them than I did in libraries. While that statement is not likely to entice you to carry on, let me suggest that ‘filling’ or ‘service stations’, like libraries, can be interesting places. Also, like university libraries, they are disappearing quickly.
Since you are still not convinced, I will mention “The Book Monk: The Printer the World’s Best Photographers Trust Most”. His name is Gerhard Steidl and fittingly enough, “the best printer in the world” resides in Gottingen. If you are lucky enough to get him to produce one of your books it will be “unique, printed with a bespoke combination of inks and papers.” He just published Gas Stop by David Freund. If Steidl and Freund can devote months to gas stations and turn out four volumes then surely you should be convinced the subject is worth our time. Well, at least their treatment is worth your time, so I will provide details below.
The Architecture
These days, there is not much that is distinctive about the buildings from which one buys gasoline. That was not always the case. There used to be a large number of petroleum companies and they had to be very creative when it came to attracting attention. Architectural styles often displayed regional themes. There were old mission style stations in the Southwest with a “pueblo” look ,while in Boston the Beacon Oil Company’s prototype was more “colonial”: “The building’s prominent columns, balustrade, dome, and lantern were copied from Charles Bulfinch’s Massachusetts State House, one of Boston’s premier landmarks located on Beacon Hill. A globe, banded to denote latitude and longitude, was piled atop the already prominent dome and lantern, the whole to signify Boston’s claim to be “The Hub.” (Jakle & Sculle, p.159).
London, Ontario and Supertest Petroleum
The picture below shows a cottage-style gas station that is now a ‘convenience’ or ‘variety’ store and, like ‘general’ stores, they also are disappearing.
The Road Maps
In the early days, roads were not well-marked or well-mapped. Maps were needed and they were provided by service stations. Now largely supplanted by Siri and on-board GPS systems, maps too are disappearing.
“The road map is surely the most significant artifact of the automotive age. Given out by the oil companies as the ultimate piece of advertising to promote the use of their products, the maps charted the yellow brick road of our collective imagination.
Experts generally agree that the Gulf Oil Company gave away the first free road maps in Pittsburgh in 1914. The map was 12 by 10 inches, with a roadster depicted on the cover. By 1914, Gulf had given out 300,000 state maps, and by 1920 it had distributed some 16,000,000 state maps.
But these road maps were even more than tickets to paradise. Walter W. Ristow, an eminent historian of cartography at the Library of Congress, in a definitive article marking the fiftieth anniversary of the phenomenon in 1964 stated: “These useful maps...are among the distinctive and essential by-products of our modern automobile culture. They are a uniquely American contribution to the development of cartography.” (Margolies, p.36).
SERVICE Stations
If you find it difficult to believe that attendants (often in uniforms) would wash your windshield and check your oil and tires you are unlikely to believe that clean restrooms were part of the package of services offered. Here are three examples:
Phillips 66:
“Phillips 66 launched its “Clean Rest Room Crusade in 1938 by dispatching corps of Highway Hostesses in their sales areas. The Crusades were introduced by ceremonies in several cities, sometime presided over by Mrs. Matilda Passmore, a “registered nurse, widely known traveler, and nationally known health lecturer,” who reportedly “stressed the need for daily use of an approved germicide such as Lysol to overcome the inherent fear of women for possible disease which may be contracted in contact with unkept [sic] toilet fixtures.”
Texaco:
Texaco’s Registered Rest Room Program was surely the industry leader in rest room promotion. “My ‘powder room’ on every road,” proclaimed one billboard depicting a chic women - powder puff in hand. Thousands of rest rooms were registered by number, and dealers took an eight-point pledge to keep their facilities clean and fully equipped…. The “White Patrol” inspectors in a fleet of forty-eight two-door white coupes, crisscrossed the country to enforce the pledge.”
Shell:
This company promoted the “White Cross of Cleanliness”.
(Margolies, pp. 102-103).
They Are Disappearing
I grew up in a small town and there were three filling stations very close to my house and more scattered, like churches, throughout the town. There are less of them now and when found, the gas pumps in front of them are often just in the way of those who have stopped to fill up on MoonPies and RC Colas (or six-packs and lottery tickets). You probably have noticed fewer places to purchase gas in your area and if you stray far from the interstates or the 400-series of highways here in Ontario you better check your fuel gauge before doing so. They are also disappearing in urban areas. In Toronto and Vancouver the number of stations has fallen as property prices have risen. Cars now get better mileage and some don’t need gasoline at all. See some related articles below.
The loss of gas stations is not at all like the extinction of Carolina Parakeets and Passenger Pigeons. Still it is worth noting their passing.
Sources:
Books:
The new four volume book Gas Stop is by David Freund. Additional information is available from the publisher Steidl Books. For a good article about Gerhard Steidl see: “The Book Monk,” by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker, May 22, 2017, p.61.
“Gasoline presents 35 archive press images of gas stations taken between 1944 and 1995. They have been collected by writer David Campany, purchased from the photography archives of several American newspapers which have been discarding their analogue print collections and moving to the now ubiquitous .jpeg or .tif formats.”
The two books below were the ones used for this post. The one by Margolies has some great images, illustrations and photos.
Jakle, John A., and Keith A. Sculle. The Gas Station in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002.
“Why were early gas stations built to resemble English cottage and Greek temples? How does Teddy Roosevelt's busting of the Standard Oil Trust in 1911 relate to the lack of Exxon and Chevron stations in the Midwest today? What corporate decisions and economic pressures lay behind the Bauhaus-inspired stations of the 1930s? Is there a link between feminism and the rise of the Gas'n'Go-style convenience store? What have gas stations symbolized in the American experience?
Geographer John Jakle and historian Keith Sculle have teamed up to write a unique and comprehensive history of the American gas station - its architecture, its place in the landscape and in popular culture, and its economic role as the most visible manifestation of one of the country's largest industries. Here is the definitive book on the subject, from the first curbside filling stations - with their jury rigged water tanks and garden hoses - to the nationwide chains of look-alike stations whose design pioneered the "place-product-packaging" concept copied by motels and fast-food restaurants.
Jakle and Sculle begin with a look at how the gas station evolved in response to
America's growing mobility. They describe the oil company marketing strategies that led to the familiar brand names, logos, uniforms, and station designs that came to dominate the nation's highways. They explain why certain companies and their
stations thrived in certain regions while others failed. And they document the reasons for the gas station's abrupt decline in recent decades.
Illustrated with more than 150 photos and drawings - of gas stations, vintage advertisements, maps, and memorabilia - the book offers a wealth of information and colorful details. The first architect-designed gas station - a Pittsburgh Gulf station in 1913 - was also the first to offer free road maps; the familiar Shell name and logo date from 1907, when a British mother-of-pearl importer expanded its line to include the newly discovered oil of the Dutch East Indies; the first enclosed gas stations were built only after the first enclosed cars made motoring a year-round activity - and operating a service station was no longer a "seasonal" job; the system of "octane" rating was introduced by Sun Oil as a marketing gimmick (74 for premium in 1931).
As the number of "true" gas stations continues its steady decline - from 239,000
in 1969 to fewer than 100,000 today - the words and images of this book bear witness to an economic and cultural phenomenon that was perhaps more uniquely American than any other of this century.”
Margolies, John. Pump and Circumstance: Glory Days of the Gas Station. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996.
"Pump and Circumstance is a rich and lively celebration of that icon of American roadside culture: the gas station. John Margolies traces the entertaining and significant tradition of gas station design, history, and lore - from horse-drawn pumps at the turn of the century to the convenience stores and self-serve pumpers of today. Particular attention is given to "the golden age" from 1920 to 1940, when humble curbside stations evolved into palaces of petroleum. Then, the whole experience became much more than just filling the tank: attendants in spiffy uniforms bustled about among gleaming pumps, eye-catching signs, and strings of pennants flapping in the wind." "Those days are gone now, but John Margolies brings this era back to life by combining rare archival photographs, postcards, advertisements, and other service station artifacts and collectibles with his own trademark color photographs. He delves into such diverse and unusual topics as the hoopla of the sparkling and sometimes not-so-sparkling rest room; the evolution of road maps; and the development of gas pumps from jerrybuilt hot water tanks to the sleek, computerized vending machines of today. Pump and Circumstance is the definitive book of its kind - a nostalgic and lighthearted remembrance of the gas stations of our youth.”
For some articles about the reduction in the number of gas stations see:
Motor Mouth: “Hot Real Estate Market Drying up Gas Stations: Measuring Profit in Pennies Can't Compete with Downtown Land Worth Millions of Dollars,” David Booth, Driving, April 13, 2017
“While much has been written on the demise of the gas station — there were as many as 20,000 in 1990, while fewer than 12,000 are operating in Canada today — attributing their demise to the rising popularity of electric cars — as Maclean’s and the Financial Post do — is vastly exaggerating the success of the environmental movement.
Nonetheless, gas stations — especially in big city downtown cores — are disappearing, their dwindling profit margins and the soaring value of the property they rest on making their continued existence untenable. Finding a pump in Toronto’s Bloor Street-Queen’s Quay corridor is getting ever more problematic. Chevron recently announced the pending sales of five of its Shell stations in Vancouver, and it’s not hard to see why. Thanks to Vancouver’s insatiable appetite for condos, one of Chevron’s locations had its value re-assessed at $32.8 million, making a worthwhile return on capital from the pennies-a-litre profits of pumping gasoline all but impossible. Only Montreal clings to a convenient number of downtown gas stations, and one wonders how long that can last given Quebec’s (relatively) booming economy.
Nor is this problem confined to Canada. In San Francisco, for instance, there are 40 per cent fewer gas stations than there were but a decade ago, abc7news reporting that literally “hundreds of gas stations have closed across the Bay Area since 2000.” Mainly, says the TV station, because the average net profit of five cents per gallon can’t compete with San Fran’s soaring real estate market. According to the New York Times, there are now less than 50 gas stations in Manhattan — despite car registrations increasing by 100,000 in the last five years — and less than 10 below 96th Street. The reason? Look no further than the BP station that recently sold for more than US$25 million, only to be replaced by a luxury 56-unit condominium. Even in America’s suburbs, the lure of filthy real estate lucre is putting gas stations out of business. “Properties are just worth too much money,” R. Steven Embrey, general manager at Eastham’s Auto Service Center, told the Washington Post before he stopped selling fuel for good at a gas station in Bethesda (a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C.), in business since 1929.”
“Commercial Real Estate: Gas Station Companies Cashing out on Value of Vancouver Real Estate,” Evan Duggan, Vancouver Sun, Sep. 19, 2017
“Vancouver will likely lose more gas stations as land values soar and high-density zoning along major corridors in the city encourages more fuel companies to cash out, says a commercial real estate expert.
Earlier this month, Chevron Canada confirmed it would be selling and closing five more gas stations in the City of Vancouver.
These sales follow Chevron’s previous divestment of its downtown station at 1698 West Georgia Street, which has since closed after being purchased by Anthem Properties. B.C. Assessment valued that plot at $32.8 million, but media reports have said the deal was worth $72 million.
He said skyrocketing land values in Vancouver make selling the land far more lucrative than selling fuel at those stations.”
“Why Gas Stations are in Decline in Canada: As the Number of Gas Stations Plummets, They’re Gradually Being Replaced with Charging Stations for Electric Cars—and a New Way to Think About ‘Filling Up’,”Adrian Lee, Maclean’s, June 4, 2014.
“In 2007, the Joy gas station in Toronto—renowned for its château-style architecture—was lifted off its moorings, moved across the street from its lakeside location and restored. Then last year, in Calgary, retro full-service station Eamon’s Bungalow Camp was declared worth saving by city council after a grassroots campaign earned the endorsement of heartthrob Corey Hart, who filmed a music video in front of the station’s iconic sign in 1986. Who’d have thought that gas stations, of all places, would one day have sentimental value? “When I was a kid, we always used to hang out by the gas station, drink Cokes, your friends would come in to fill up, and it’d be a great place for young boys to get their first job,” says John O’Dell, a senior editor for U.S. automotive guide Edmunds.com. “There were lots of them around.”
That time has passed. A May survey by consulting firm MJ Ervin & Associates found there are fewer than 11,850 gas stations in Canada, down from more than 20,000 in 1989. (A similar decline has taken place in the U.S., where the number of fuelling stations has dropped by more than a quarter since the mid-1990s.) The reasons for the fall are manifold. Petroleum producers are leaving the business of selling gas to the likes of Wal-Mart, Costco and Canadian Tire, while profit margins have grown razor-thin. At the same time, demand has dropped due to improvements in fuel efficiency and a decline, since the recession, in how much people drive. “It’s a pretty dire situation, especially in rural areas,” says Alex Scholten, president of the Canadian Convenience Store Association.”
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