Some Final Images of Petro Stop On West Broadway...

Contributed photos, xoxo, blog post by John Hoff

Though the demise of Petro Stop has been well documented on this blog, including video which showed the famous "dollar gas" sign being demolished, I found a few more stray pictures and I thought--for the sake of posterity--I'd go ahead and publish these photos.

The image above shows some of the plastic numbers from the sign scattered in the snow. With the permission of the demolition supervisor, all those plastic numbers were scavenged. I'm not sure what we will DO with them, exactly, but at moments like this there is only a narrow window of opportunity to preserve history so better to preserve first and figure out later.

These next images show...




...scavengers picking through the remains of the building looking for salable metal.

The awning for the Petro Stop station was left standing, temporarily, after the building was knocked down.

Somehow, a perfect little blue vase (MADE IN TAIWAN) managed to survive the destruction, and became yet another souvenir in my possession. With a Sharpie Marker, I wrote the date and "Petro Stop" on the bottom of the vase.

And so the little gas station comes to an end. The building was tiny and obsolete and would have been torn down eventually, so there's no sense mourning it, but there are plenty of other buildings on West Broadway which could be saved and renovated. Will this happen?

Looking at the metal scavengers doing their thing, one gets the sense of time going backwards, of a built-up civilization being chopped up and sold off by the pound to support a lesser degree of civilization. Are we trading a world of vacant buildings for a world of vacant lots?