Old gas stations

[LizzieMaine]

"Damn counterfeit Aero patterns!"

 

[2jakes]

"Damn counterfeit Aero patterns!"

Alas....original Aero patterns designed for
slender figures of bygone days.
Darn!

 

[vitanola]

"The real McCoy" !

A plethora of "Lizzies" at lunch time!
Luv this photo !

I can't take my eyes off of the "War" lunch boxes, made of vulcanized fiber to save metal for the war effort. A great many items were made with these erzatz materials; "Waralarm" alarm clocks, which used thin metal plates, pot metal pinions, thin steel gears and fiber cases, "War" appliances, simplified units which used minimal trim and could be purchased only with proper priority paperwork, radio consoles built with automobile radio chassis left-over from the truncated 1942 model year, and "utility" furniture, usually solid maple "Colonial" styles. We forget that hundreds of thousands of new households were formed in the War period as people moved from one part of the country to another to work in newly built war industries. These consumer goods were available during the war, but as a rule they could only be purchased by people who could prove a genuine need for them.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And get a load of the mason jar that one there has her drink or her soup in. Hipster!

 

[Fading Fast]

And get a load of the mason jar that one there has her drink or her soup in. Hipster!

If your mental acumen translated into marksmanship, you'd make one heck of a sniper.

 

[Ghostsoldier]

Rob

 

[Ghostsoldier]

Rob

 

[kaiser]

And get a load of the mason jar that one there has her drink or her soup in. Hipster!

I remember my Mom putting food, like pudding and such in a mason jar in my Dad's lunch bucket back in the 1960's. It was cheap and did the job.

 

[Ghostsoldier]

I still drink iced tea in one. [emoji6]

 

[Trenchfriend]

Rob

Aaaah, wonderful rail-tanker.

 

[BobHufford]

Started out as a Phillips station (Cuba, Missouri).

 

[Ghostsoldier]

 

[Ghostsoldier]

Rob

 

[Trenchfriend]

I was refueling the car, this afternoon. Germanys gas-pump-nozzles are still analog, hooray!

 

[LizzieMaine]

Rob

Those Gulf iceboxes were just gorgeous examples of 1930s industrial design, right up there with the Teague Texacos. We had a completely intact, unmolested, operating one in the town where I lived in the '90s, up until the meddlesome biddies of the local Garden Club campaigned to have it remodeled. Off came the porcelain, up went cheap cedar shingles and a fake mansard roof, and the place closed within six months. It's now an ugly, badly-weathered furniture remodeling shop, and the fake mansard roof looks as stupid as ever.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Rob

Has this nice gas-station design something to do with Bauhaus, maybe??

 

[Fading Fast]

Those Gulf iceboxes were just gorgeous examples of 1930s industrial design, right up there with the Teague Texacos. We had a completely intact, unmolested, operating one in the town where I lived in the '90s, up until the meddlesome biddies of the local Garden Club campaigned to have it remodeled. Off came the porcelain, up went cheap cedar shingles and a fake mansard roof, and the place closed within six months. It's now an ugly, badly-weathered furniture remodeling shop, and the fake mansard roof looks as stupid as ever.

There's a wonderful form follows function but not in a cold antiseptic way to the "icebox" design. This was, just for me (as it's all taste), when modern architecture was getting it really right and hadn't yet become cold and almost angry.

 

[Ghostsoldier]

Rob

 

[LizzieMaine]

Has this nice gas-station design something to do with Bauhaus, maybe??

Walter Dorwin Teague, who was the first designer to produce a station in this style -- for Texaco, in 1935 -- was very familiar with Bauhaus and had worked under a Bauhaus designer in the 1920s, and the influence is pretty clear in his work.

He was also influenced by mysticism -- he set great weight in the image of the Five Pointed Star, which fit in well with his work for Texaco, and wrote about this at length in his book "Design This Day." He was quite an odd character.

His gas station design, however, was the most influential ever created -- Texaco built over 20,000 stations to his specifications between the late thirties and the early sixties, and several other companies basically helped themselves to his concept. Gulf's "icebox" was almost a direct swipe of Teague's design, although it featured more rounded corners and blue stripes along the fascia instead of green. Cities Service also used a design that essentially duplicated Teague's, complete with green stripes. Other companies weren't quite so baldfaced about their design cribbing -- Socony and Esso used one red stripe instead of three, whoa, different design entirely! -- but the influence was still very clear. Without Teague's work the mid-20th century roadside would have looked very different.

 

[2jakes]

"If you look closely, I think you'll see that this is a Gulf Station."

Sylva, North Carolina

Something for the gents next door on the leather lounge.