Old car stuff is cool. Vintage cars are cool and the retro diners and drive-ins they parked at are cool. Spend an afternoon driving around Toronto’s cookie-cutter shopping centres and restaurants, and you too will long for the old-days when even your local gas station had unique style.
Case in point…the Dundas Gas Bars in the west end.
Here’s a relic from the golden age of motoring, located at 1715 Dundas St West in Toronto. The place is run down now, but you can see what used to be a service station cool enough that Fonzie could have worked there.
The owner Bill is in his mid-70s, and he got his place from his father. Bill says it was built in 1947, but got angry when questioned about this point.
It’s unclear if this was Shell service station in the old days. And we don’t know enough to say if this is art-moderne or art-deco. It’s old and its cool…but it’s seen better days. This is going to sound like Sally from ‘Cars‘ but just imagine this place in its heyday.
With the plain-Jane gas stations all looking exactly the same (and boring) can you imagine a time when filling up your tank look as cool as this.
My grandma lived in a tiny town that had a church, a gas station, grain elevators, and a post office. Everything else had gone out of business by the time my sisters and I were spending summers there.
The gas station was THE place to be in town. They had old fashioned everything, including one of those pop coolers where the bottles sat in ice water. Nothing like a Grape Crush on a hot day from the gas station.
Brings back a lot of fun memories.
Love it! Grape Crush in glass bottles from the only gas station in town
.
Thank you for that story. I thought Im the only person with an affinity for old gas stations as a meeting place.