Roadside Attraction: The American Gas Station as Visited by Hopper, Evans, Lange, Ruscha and Hitchcock

The first single-purpose gas station in the United States was built in St. Louis in 1905.  Two years later a second gas station appeared in Seattle.  It was an era of expensive, hand-built cars, of cities crossed by trolley and train lines and separated by large expanses of farm land serviced by unpaved roads and dotted with small towns, where, if you were lucky, you might find a can of gasoline at a general store.  "Suburbia" was not a word Americans used very much. In September 1908 the first Model T rolled off the assembly line.  Over a period of nearly 19 years, Ford would produce 15 million of them.  The advent of affordable cars created demand for the thousands of gas stations that began to spring up across the country.  By the time Edward Hopper painted Gas in 1940, they seemed to be everywhere...

Hopper's painting captures the lonesome feel of a transition that is both spatial and temporal. Our imaginary gas station is at the edge where townscape gives way to wilderness, and we are at the sunset moment when dark creeps into the forest and the lights come on in town.  Hopper captures the stillness of this moment, and a certain disquiet in the beckoning curve of the highway that darkens under the trees as it trails into the distance beyond the station. The lone attendant bends over some work at the pump, his back to the darkening woods. Over twenty years later, Leonard Cohen* would sing the question, "Where do all these highways go, now that we are free?"

Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange photographed rural and small-town America for the Works Progress Administration during the Depression.  Evans shot the above photo of the Gibson Motor Co. in mid-Thirties West Virginia.  Note the crossing diagonals of power and phone lines, and the way they echo the crossing lines in the pavement.  The loud signage of the station and the Bell System sign hovering above it promise 20th century convenience and connections, but Evans contrasts this with a vacant street scene in a place with visibly poor prospects.

                                                

Dorothea Lange made the above photo in Kern County, California in November 1938. The sign at the air pump is a reminder that the hard times ushered in by the stock market crash of 1929 were still visible all over the country nearly a decade later, and perhaps most striking in farm country. It is also a reminder that the interests of individual station owners did not always align with the interests of the big oil companies. 

In 1963, artist Ed Ruscha would publish "Twentysix Gasoline Stations", a book of black and white photography depicting gas stations he passed along the highway between his Los Angeles home and that of his parents in Oklahoma City. The photography is gritty and seemingly artless, documenting a building and place type so familiar that it was seldom observed with any attention.

When Ruscha moved from the darkroom to his studio to make screen prints, he reduced what he called the "polished newness" of this Standard Station to its geometric and commercial essentials. As with Hopper, there are no automobiles and no customers.  The melancholy feeling of Hopper's Gas is replaced here with an exuberant but possibly ironic expression of postwar optimism.  In place of the beckoning darkness of the road vanishing to the right in Hopper's painting, we have strong diagonals converging at the right, emphasizing the simple geometry and the over-scaled signage. Details like landscaping and surrounding buildings, reflections in glass, and outward signs of interior space are omitted. There's no room for a brooding attendant at the pumps here.  Pop Art is just around the next corner in the unseen road...

It turned out there was danger around the corner too. Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, released in spring of 1963, the same year as Ruscha's "Twentysix Gasoline Stations", was not in the ironic spirit of Pop Art. Instead, it was a fairly conventional (for Hitchcock) adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's story about an unexplained attack by wild birds on the inhabitants of a small town. Hitchcock filmed many scenes in and around the coastal Northern California town of Bodega Bay. Here, an attack on a customer at the gas pump leads to a chain of mishaps ending in a huge conflagration...

Today, the notion that we might worry about fires triggered by wild birds seems almost as quaint as the gas prices listed outside the doomed Capitol Oil Co.  With nine of the ten worst California wildfires having occurred since 2003, we have shifted our focus to droughts and fires resulting from climate change, itself related to use of fossil fuels. If we're nervous about wild birds at all, it's because we fear they may become extinct...

There were, at last count, around 168,000 gas stations in the United States, though their numbers have been reduced in recent years by declining profit margins, and also by zoning and environmental regulations which have restricted locations.  Few of these stations look like this one, built in the 1930s on Highway 1 in Carmel Highlands, California.  Like Edward Hopper's imaginary station, it sits at a transition, as the last vestige of townscape gives way to the wildness of the coastal highlands and the forests of Big Sur.  It may be a good place to rest before pondering the transition from gasoline-powered vehicles to what comes next.

*Song Credit:

"The Stories of the Street", copyright by Leonard Cohen, 1967.

Photo Credits:

Top & 3rd from top:  moma.org

2nd: artdepict.com 

4th: npr.org

5th: moma.org

6th: gasbuddy.com

7th: bodegabay.com

8th & 9th: roadarch.com