Father Pitt

Tag: Service Stations

  • Old Filling Station on West Liberty Avenue

    Old filling station

    Pittsburgh invented the drive-up filling station for automobiles, and every once in a while we run across a relic of that first generation of gas stations. This one in the West Liberty Avenue automotive district is not a filling station anymore, but it is still attached to a garage. It appears on a 1925 Sanborn Fire Insurance map as “Fill’g sta.,” but we cannot be sure of the date, because those Sanborn maps were kept up to date for years by carefully pasting newly printed jigsaw pieces over the map, as we can see in this image:

    Old filling station

    Capital Avenue, which is still Belgian block, rises steeply behind the little building, so that the rear of the building is mostly under ground.

    Old filling station

  • Oakdale

    Shops on Noblestown Road, Oakdale

    Oakdale is a pleasant little borough in the western suburbs. The town was devastated by floods from the remnants of Hurricane Ivan in 2004, and some of it never recovered; but the back streets are full of pleasant houses, and the business district has business in it, and the population is growing.

    Shops on Noblestown Road in Oakdale

    The tiny urban core of Oakdale is a row of shops on Noblestown Road.

    5021 Noblestown Road, Oakdale

    This building, 120 years old this year, has kept its corner entrance. Addendum: This was the First National Bank of Oakdale; the architect was Max Brenning.1

    Corner entrance
    100 Clinton Avenue

    The odd polygonal end of this building probably had large showroom windows at one time.

    Old service station

    Finally, an old service station. Few old-fashioned service stations have survived without massive alterations, but this one still keeps its attractive little red-roofed hut with—once again—a corner entrance.

    Old service station
    Olympus E-20N; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.
    Comments

  • Old Service Station in Arlington

    Service station in Arlington, Pittsburgh

    Very few service stations from the early years of the automobile have survived in Pittsburgh, even though Pittsburgh invented the drive-up filling station. This one is a good representative of the class, and though it no longer sells gasoline it remains in the automobile business today.

    Woody’s Towing
    Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.