Former Chevron Gas Station in AZ

Cave Creek Service Station, Cave Creek Arizona

Date added: September 04, 2024

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The Cave Creek Service Station was built in Phoenix in 1936. The station was moved from Phoenix to Cave Creek in 1952, but the move did not adversely affect its architectural character.

When automobiles were first invented, gasoline was dispensed not by special stations but rather by general oil retailers who sold kerosene for illumination and lubricants for machinery. Motorists lugged the gas in metal can from bulk tank to car tank, a laborious, impractical, and dangerous ritual. Fortunately the practice was short-lived. Around 1905 pumps began to appear that allowed gas to be transferred quickly and safely via rubber hose to the awaiting car. When car sales soared and the demand for gas skyrocketed, petroleum companies scoured the countryside for locations to sell oil and fuel to the growing ranks of motorists. The companies convinced thousands of merchants to add curbside pumps to their businesses.

Petroleum companies also began to experiment with new locations, giving rise to an embryonic form of the gas station. By 1905 the Automobile Gasoline Company established a chain of stations in St. Louis, Standard Oil opened its first station in Seattle in 1907; hundreds more soon followed. Most of the first stations were built and run directly by the oil companies. Others were owned and operated by investors who bought lots, erected structures, and negotiated contracts to sell gas. By World War I, company and private stations were mushrooming along roadside America at the rate of about 1,200 a year.

In contrast to curbside pumps, gas stations signaled a change in urban land use. Stations required enough space for motorists to pull completely off the street. In densely built-up areas, older buildings often had to be leveled to make room for the new drive-ins. Main Street sites that once held stores, apartments, or offices now sported a small shelter for an attendant or two, some gas pumps, and a sign mounted on a pole near the street. The remainder of the lot was given over to parking and driveways.

Most of the early gas stations were little more than tumble-down sheds or shacks. A few were large enough to house an office with desk, table, heating stove, and chairs. And they were everywhere, by the end of World War I, they were particularly ubiquitous in cities. Contributing to urban blight, the ramshackle stations became a target of concern to citizens, officials, and those who espoused the ideals of the City Beautiful movement.

Public pressure and a desire to present a better corporate image inspired oil companies in the 1920s to build more attractive stations. Often called "artistic stations," buildings of this genre gained widespread acceptance. Some approached the stature of civic monuments, with their Greek, Beaux Arts, or Neoclassical detailing. Most, however, were more modest affairs that closely resembled the tidy homes being built in the early twenties. The English Cottage, Tudor Revival, and Bungalow styles were particularly popular. "House stations" were calculated to trigger a feeling of neat, safe, comfortable domesticity in the minds of passing motorists. So successful was the concept that companies such as Pure Oil continued to use it until the early 1950s. Another innovation of the 1920s was prefabrication, allowing stations to be erected quickly and moved easily if a location proved unprofitable. Many house stations were, in fact, prefabricated buildings.

In the 1920s the oil companies worked to soften the intrusion of the gas station on the American landscape. In the 1930s they sought to maximize its visibility. The Depression brought about the change. Oil companies and their stations sought new ways to compete for vanishing dollars. They added new services (flat repair, lubrication, etc.), and products such as tires, batteries, and accessories (the trinity of products known in the trade as TBA) to generate greater income per station. They also sought an overall image make-over; "since all gasoline and oil basically looked the same, one way for oil company executives to make their liquid products appear modern was to give an exciting new look to the facilities that dispensed them". Packaging assumed new importance, and there was no larger package with which to impress customers than the station itself.

By the mid-1930s the oil giants, assisted by architects and industrial designers, were developing a new range of station prototypes. The prototypes spawned a generation of stations designed to present a fresh and modern corporate image to the traveling public, to provide well-lit and clearly visible service bays, and to showcase TBA. By the end of the decade, white "oblong boxes" with large display windows, offices, service bays, storage rooms, and sanitary restrooms all under one roof were edging out the house stations of the twenties. English-cottage coziness gave way to hard-edged modernism; International and Streamline Moderne influences were particularly apparent in the new stations' designs. The oblong boxes contrasted, even clashed, with their surroundings, all the better to attract customers.

Many companies were quick to embrace the new look. For example, Texaco in 1934 hired industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague to restyle their stations. The resulting prototype, a porcelain-enameled metal-clad white box with contrasting green streamlines, was hailed with excitement by the architectural world. Similarly, designers Norman Bel Geddes followed by Frederick G. Frost in 1934 developed sleek new prototypes for Socony Oil.

The prototype for the Cave Creek Service Station developed in such times and circumstances. In the mid 1930s Standard Oil of California, whose territory included the Pacific Coast states as well as Arizona and New Mexico, hired industrial designer Ralph N. Aldrich to design a prototype for the company's "Standard Stations." From the patent number on the station's column, it is known that the design Aldrich submitted in 1935 and patented in 1936 (Patent inspiration. Its most striking feature, an elongated canopy, became a form of trademark for Standard Oil of California. From Aldrich's design, stations were prefabricated of metal and shipped to locations in the five western states. The one that eventually became the Cave Creek station was shipped circa 1936 to Phoenix. At that time it was one of 14 Standard Stations in the city.

The oblong box of the 1930s continued to be built into the early 1950s. In the mid-1950s companies including Standard Oil reworked their old designs. Motorists were traveling at faster speeds, and the oil giants sought architecture that would make a split-second impression. Taking their cue from independent station operators, the corporations resorted to the exaggeration of once purely functional features. Flat roofs gave way to rakishly tilted ones, and jutting, V-shaped canopies came to dominate station facades. The attention-drawing features of the new stations created a visual cacophony that was far from pleasing. By the early 1960s, gas stations were routinely receiving bad press, "joining junkyards and billboards as scapegoats in the public's growing outrage against the automobile's despoliation of the landscape".

The Cave Creek Service Station represents what many "road scholars" consider to be the golden age of American gas stations. Its architecture successfully expresses the Modern Movement in a highly commercial context. Its style developed in response to the Great Depression when oil companies sought bold new images to attract consumers and enhance product recognition. Its prefabricated nature served its purpose well; the station was designed to be nearly as mobile as the public it served. When the station was moved from Phoenix to Cave Creek in 1952, it continued to retain its architectural character. It still conveys corporate America's approach to industrial design and product packaging in the 1930s.

Building Description

The property is a good example of a style of automobile service station designed in 1935 and patented in 1936 by Ralph N. Aldrich for Standard Stations, Inc., a division of Standard Oil of California. The station is a prefabricated building consisting of galvanized steel panels on a frame of steel girders. The design reflects the Modern Movement, showing elements of the Streamline Moderne and International styles. Character-defining elements include the building's strong horizontal emphasis, smooth wall surface, flat roof with beveled coping at the roofline, extensive glazing, elongated canopy, minimal decoration, and streamlines on the canopy columns and entry surround. The station was originally erected in Phoenix circa 1936. In 1952 it was moved to Cave Creek, where it functioned as a service station until the late 1980s.

The service station lies in Cave Creek about 30 miles north of the state capital and county seat of Phoenix. The station faces north onto Cave Creek Road, the main street that historically connected the desert foothills community with the metropolitan area. When the station was erected on this site in 1952, Cave Creek Road had two lanes. It now has four janes and a median, but still accommodates only low-speed traffic. The property is adjoined on the south by a trailer park, on the west by an office building, on the north by the road, and on the east by retail shops. This unpretentious cluster of buildings, dating variously from the 1930s to the 1970s, comprises Cave Creek's center and downtown.

The station has a prefabricated structural system consisting of galvanized steel panels on steel girders. It rests on a concrete pad that extends several feet beyond the walls, forming pavement around the building. Other construction materials include: wood, used for doors and cabinets; plate glass, used for windows of the office, garage doors, and restrooms; and fluorescent tube lighting, attached under the canopy and inside the building. All of these materials appear to be original.

Many prefabricated service stations of the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s had porcelain enamel surfaces. The material was made from a soft sheet of steel, called "enameling stock," covered with a layer of "frit," minute particles of shattered glass resulting from the contact of molten glass with cold water, Frit-covered steel was placed in fusing ovens at high temperatures to create a hard-surfaced material. The advantage of enameled stations was that they presented gleaming, sanitary surfaces to motorists but took only minutes to clean. However, there is no evidence that the Cave Creek station ever had such cladding. On the contrary, its galvanized steel panels appears to have been factory-painted with oil-based pigment (white with red trim) that has oxidized to a fine chalk through time.

The building consists of two zones: the building proper, containing an office, service bay, storage room, and two restrooms; and a canopy, which was designed to shelter attendants as they pumped gas. Scholars of service stations would classify the Cave Creek property as "an oblong box," a form that became popular during the Great Depression.

The building reflects a minimalist approach to architecture that is clearly within the Modern Movement. Borrowing from the Streamline Moderne and International styles, the design was meant to convey an appearance of speed, efficiency, and progress. The design was also intended to enhance product recognition. The station was designed to be a "Standard Station" associated with Standard Oil of California. The industrial designer therefore included an element that became a Standard Station trademark: an elongated canopy. The long canopy on the Cave Creek station today remains its most striking feature. Measuring 12' wide by 32' 5" long, the structure is only 2' shorter than the rest of the building to which it is attached. Two columns support the far end. Three-inch steel pipes form their structural core. Surrounding each pipe is a matrix of steel girders clad with galvanized steel panels to form 15" square columns. The columns are impressed with pinstripes (streamlines) for nearly their entire height. The same motif repeats around the building entry at the other end of the canopy.

The base of one of the canopy columns bears a porcelain enamel plaque reading "PATENT NO. DES. 98470." Its meaning was deciphered using the patent microform collection archived in the Noble Science Library at Arizona State University. The plaque indicates that patent #98470 was indeed a design for a service station. The industrial designer was Ralph N. Aldrich of San Francisco, assignor to Standard Stations, Inc., also of San Francisco. Aldrich applied for the patent on December 9^th, 1935, and received it on February 4^th, 1936. In the two-page patent document, Aldrich stated that he had invented a "new, original, and ornamental Design for a Service Station" and provided plan and perspective drawings of it.

A comparison of patent drawings with current drawings and photographs indicates that the Cave Creek building closely matches Aldrich's prototype. The design and plan are remarkably unaltered: the sleek canopy is attached to a glass-walled office leading to a service bay followed at the rear with a storage room between restrooms. The Cave Creek station varies from the patent drawing in only one respect. To secure the service bay at night and enclose it in bad weather, a system of three horizontally sliding doors have been installed on the west elevation and a folding metal grille has been installed on the east elevation. Close inspection of these features suggests that they were part of the original building as ordered from the prefabricator. Custom orders were not uncommon for Standard Stations erected in central Arizona in the 1930s. For example, Sanborn maps indicate that some Standard Stations (identified as such through business directories) bore not one but two canopies, with the second one attached to the office at a right angle. Double-canopied Standard Stations often occurred at busy intersections; an example once stood in Phoenix at 620 West Roosevelt, at the corner of Roosevelt and 7^th Avenue.

Other features of the Cave Creek building merit note. Encircling the flat roof of the entire building is coping that bevels back at about a 20-degree angle. Above the office, the coping assumes parapet-like proportions, projecting a foot higher there than above the rest of the building. The double door to the office is notable for its curvilinear woodwork of Moderne inspiration. Inside the front office, to the right of the entry and below the front windows, are low, built-in wooden cabinets that double as seats and storage bins. A wall of windows separates the office from the service bay; a customer waiting in the office would have been afforded an unrestricted view of the "patient" undergoing surgery in the next room (the service bay). The two restrooms at the rear of the building each have frosted glass windows and door transoms; the "men's" room (on the west elevation) even contains some original fixtures such as a 1930s sink and "BORAX" hand-soap dispenser. Sandwiched between the restrooms and accessible only by a sturdy door from the service bay is the storage room, a windowless, vault-like chamber.

Prefabricated stations such as this one were designed to be not only erected quickly but also moved easily. After standing on 19^th Avenue in Phoenix for more than a decade, this station was moved in 1952 to Cave Creek, where it continued to be a Standard Station. Under Gerry Permutt and subsequent owners, the station sold Standard Oil of California (Chevron) products before closing in the late 1980s. The Town of Cave Creek currently leases the building for storage space. The present owner plans to rehabilitate the building and return it to commercial use.