I guess my star is rising:

If that’s unclear, or sized oddly for your screen, here’s a crop of just the building:

Now, I was not able to guess it. I was imagining some other retail building or restaurant chain, and thinking the distinctive shape of the building was part of the previous chain’s design. Not really, though.

Hint: the building has been retrofitted a lot more than you might think would be cost-effective, and so it feels like an unlikely conversion.

Another hint: it is a customer-facing business, but it isn’t retail or dining.

Finally: the customer never walks in.

Here it is in its original life:

A car wash! With the car entrance turned into a pedestrian entrance!

Now you might wonder why that image is so blurry. It’s because Google hasn’t updated their Street View imagery for this Michigan Upper Peninsula town of Gladstone, which is where this building is.

(By the way, that’s also the case for a number of out-of-the-way places, many of which look appreciably different now than at their last photographing. And that’s another whole interesting story.)

But while a car wash might seem like an unlikely candidate here, it really is just a cinderblock box. Which is all that a lot of buildings are. Good signage and façade design covers that drab reality up a lot. I bet the interior work here was a big job, especially making the plumbing and electrical match up with a totally different kind of interior layout. I’d be curious to see the inside.

But there you go. A whimsical building conversion in a place Google hasn’t seen fit to revisit in 15 years. Interesting stuff. And now I kind of want pizza.

Related Reading:

Land Your Plane for Pizza

“Excuse Me, Where’s the Car Aisle?”

A New Spin on Driving to the Supermarket

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