A Frank Lloyd Wright Gas Station

By Joe Berk

Sue and I recently flew to Minnesota as part of Sue’s quest to visit all 50 states. I’d been there a few years ago for a business trip when I worked in the bomb business. We were having problems with a booster for one of munitions, and I visited the factory in Edina to seek assistance in finding the root cause. The factory was underground in an old Nike Hercules missile command center. It was a bit scary, being around all those explosives and the intermittent hisses from the air moisturizers (if the humidity dropped below a certain level, electrostatic discharges could induce inadvertent ignitions, hence the moisturizers).

This trip would involve no such scary bomb factory visits. In fact, there were a lot of cool things we saw in Minnesota. One was a Frank Lloyd Wright gas station.

Without setting out to do so, we’ve become a bit of a Frank Lloyd Wright website. We featured his architecture a couple of times already, once with an article by yours truly about the Fallingwater home in western Pennsylvania, and more recently with Joe Gresh’s recent piece on Taliesen West, the Frank Lloyd Wright desert home in Arizona. Architectural Digest magazine is not looking over its shoulder at ExhaustNotes, but it’s interesting that Mr. Wright’s genius has found its way into a motorcycle and gun blog.

So, about that Frank Lloyd Wright gas station: Sue found it while researching cool things to see in Minnesota. It’s a little out of character for Mr. Wright, you know, designing a gas station. It’s located in the small town of Cloquet. It came about when a guy who worked in the oil biz (a guy with evidently lots of money), one R.W. Lindholm, had Wright design a home in 1952. Lindholm liked it. In fact, he liked it so much that when Wright approached him about designing a gas station, Lindholm agreed. Lindholm wanted to beautify gas station design; Wright wanted to create a gas station that could be used as a community center and gathering place.

If that sounds goofy to you (and it did to me when I first read about it), think again. When I was a teenager with a GTO (a decidedly dangerous combination), I and all of my gearhead buddies used to hang out at Herbie Eckert’s gas station.  Herbie was a kid in my high school class who’s Dad owned an Empire gas station in New Jersey.  I hung out there most of the time with my GTO, Ralph Voorhees was there with his GTO, Bobby O’Connell was there with his Hemi Road Runner, Vernie Frantz was there with his 409 Chevy, and, well, you get the idea. It sort of seemed natural back then in the late 1960s. Yeah, the concept works: A gas station as a community center.  Especially if you’re a community of gearheads.  I don’t think that’s quite what Frank Lloyd Wright or Mr. Lindholm had in mind, but hey, it worked for us.

Wright’s gas station design was built in 1958. It was the only gas station ever designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and it’s still in use today. It’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places. When we visited, the gas station was open, but the place was pretty much empty other than one other car that had stopped for the same reason we did: To take pictures. Frank Lloyd Wright’s design was a success in that his $20,000 gas station (four times the cost of a typical gas station in 1958), came into being, but it never realized Wright’s vision in becoming a community center. Maybe it’s because there were too many people like me, Vernie, Bobby, and Ralph hanging around the place.  We must have scared them all away.

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