{"id":31539,"date":"2025-11-29T00:01:23","date_gmt":"2025-11-29T08:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=31539"},"modified":"2025-11-18T17:24:53","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T01:24:53","slug":"a-frank-lloyd-wright-gas-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2025\/11\/29\/a-frank-lloyd-wright-gas-station\/","title":{"rendered":"A Frank Lloyd Wright Gas Station"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Joe Berk<\/h6>\n

Sue and I recently flew to Minnesota as part of Sue\u2019s quest to visit all 50 states. I\u2019d 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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Without setting out to do so, we\u2019ve 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<\/a> home in western Pennsylvania, and more recently with Joe Gresh\u2019s recent piece on Taliesen West<\/a>, the Frank Lloyd Wright desert home in Arizona. Architectural Digest<\/em> magazine is not looking over its shoulder at ExhaustNotes, but it\u2019s interesting that Mr. Wright\u2019s genius has found its way into a motorcycle and gun blog.<\/p>\n

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So, about that Frank Lloyd Wright gas station: Sue found it while researching cool things to see in Minnesota. It\u2019s a little out of character for Mr. Wright, you know, designing a gas station. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s gas station.\u00a0 Herbie was a kid in my high school class who’s Dad owned an Empire gas station in New Jersey.\u00a0 I hung out there most of the time with my GTO, Ralph Voorhees was there with his GTO, Bobby O\u2019Connell 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.\u00a0 Especially if you’re a community of gearheads.\u00a0 I don’t think that’s quite what Frank Lloyd Wright or Mr. Lindholm had in mind, but hey, it worked for us.<\/p>\n

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Wright\u2019s gas station design was built in 1958. It was the only gas station ever designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and it\u2019s still in use today. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s vision in becoming a community center. Maybe it\u2019s because there were too many people like me, Vernie, Bobby, and Ralph hanging around the place.\u00a0 We must have scared them all away.<\/p>\n

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