“That looks like it used to be an auto garage” is a thing I say a lot.

And I said it recently driving through College Park, Maryland, and, when I ended up at a red light, snapped this photo out the window of the building in question:

I’ve passed this building probably hundreds of times; I lived a few hundred feet from it for two years. And I never gave the building a second thought. If you’d asked me, I probably would have guessed it wasn’t purpose-built as a Rita’s (the other, empty half used to be a donation center for GreenDrop.) But I had no knowledge of this sort of thing; back then, I couldn’t have told you what you were looking at.

Now, however, I can glance at that building and be almost certain it did, in fact, begin life as an auto garage/gas station building. Specifically, the right half would have been the store/cashier, and the left half would have been the garage bays. The fairly deep setback and large parking area would have accommodated the gas pumps and canopy.

There’s another clue: the concrete scars in the asphalt where the pumps/tank might have been covered over (two are recent, one has been there longer—perhaps I’m wrong, or perhaps new remediation was done in recent years), and, in this side view from Google Maps, a surviving exterior bathroom (originally there would have been two.)

Plus, it was built in 1966, which is the era when auto garages of this basic design were built in droves.

Now, that’s enough for me to be sure about the building’s general origin. But which auto garage was it, and what exactly would the original have looked like? I’m quite sure I’ve seen this building somewhere before, but I can’t recall where. So I combed through Google images of old gas stations. There were a lot of gas stations that looked just about like this—just do the same image search I did!

But I found an exact match. This is a screenshot—I’m not even sure that cover image is in the blog post, and the photo is copywritten.

General shape? Check. Surviving bathroom door placement? Check. Placement of pumps relative to concrete scar? Check. Door and windows on the cashier half? Check. The depth difference between the garage and cashier halves? Check.

Here’s a screenshot of another blog post using the same set of photos, but showing one from the other side of the building.

And here’s the Rita’s building from the same vantage point, showing identical window placements, except that the small door on the side of the cashier area has been turned into another window.

Now, one more little twist. Despite the windows being placed exactly the same, they may not be the original windows. Or maybe they are, and were just covered over. Because here’s the same view back in 2008!

Now I was not able to find an image of this actual Texaco, in College Park, in the 1960s. But the date is right, and a Washington Post article from the 1980s identifies—sadly without an address or exact location—a College Park Texaco. I say that’s enough evidence.

I never stop finding it fascinating how these buildings—which began life as identical or very similar models for national chains—become clay in their afterlives, after their brands fold or vacate older structures for new model buildings. Sometimes, the only thing that preserves an outmoded model building at all is its being cast out of the chain; otherwise, it would be remodeled or replaced.

And I find it equally interesting how a little bit of knowledge of the evolution of commercial forms turns the American roadside from a mess of unsightly junk into a great open museum of commerce, culture, and land-use history.

Related Reading:

A Small Virginia Market

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #2

Glass and Gas

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