Gas Station

Looking south towards East Pettigrew and Fayetteville Streets, 1940s. Speight's service station is to the left. (Courtesy State of North Carolina Archives)

Gulf Station at the southeast corner of Foster and West Geer, 1952 (Courtesy Wayne Henderson) Looking east from the west side of Foster Street, 08.03.61. (Courtesy The Herald-Sun Newspaper) Perhaps oddly, the small former Gulf Service Station on the southeast corner of West Geer and Foster St. is one of my favorite buildings in Durham. Built in the...

Looking north at the Texaco Station. , 1952. The Scott and Roberts Cleaners is in the left background on Foster St. (Courtesy Wayne Henderson) The Texaco station at the northeast corner of W. Geer and Foster Sts. appears to have originally been built in the 1940s. By the 1960s, it had become a Sinclair Station. Looking northeast, a partial view of...

319-321 West Pettigrew, looking southwest, 1965 (Courtesy Durham County Library) West Pettigrew Street, neé Railroad St., began as a residential street situated between the Blackwell Factory and the Duke Factory Looking west from the top of the Blackwell Factory, mid-1880s. Carr St. and an early Blackwell's Durham Tobacco building are in the...

The south side of the 300 block of Liberty St. had, much like the 100 block of North Queen St., succumbed to some decay and commercial creep by the mid-1960s. Only two of the once continuous row of large homes remained in January 1966. 208 North Roxboro The remainder of these houses, and the gas station, were demolished by the city using urban renewal funds.

The south side of the 400 block of Holloway was a combination of commercial and residential structures. 406 Holloway - which had been a residential structure early in the 20th century, but was replaced by a service station (one of the 4 in these two blocks,) looking southeast, 1963. 217-219 N. Dillard st. - looking west-southwest from the southeast...

The 200 block of Holloway was a transitional block between downtown and the East End during the middle portion of the 20th century. As Highway 98/US 70 leading into downtown, (in the pre-interstate era), gas stations and small services proliferated along Holloway. (Holloway was a dominantly residential street in the early 20th century, with the...

Looking northeast, with East Chapel Hill St. on the right and North Mangum on the left, 1920s. (Courtesy Durham County Library) A residential neighborhood during the 1890s-1910s, the intersection of North Mangum and East Chapel Hill was, by the 1920s, the 'border' between the growing downtown commercial area and the residential neighborhood. In the...

The northwest corner of East Chapel Hill St. and Roney Sts. was vacant land during the late 1910s and early 1920s - commercial masonry storefronts that filled in along the block face to the west didn't make it down this far, for whatever reason. A filling station was built on the corner in the late 1920s - which was a Pure Oil station by the 1940s. Looking west, 1945 (Courtesy Herald-Sun) This station was remodeled by the 1950s.

The area of West Main approaching Trinity College/Duke East Campus remained primarily residential through the 1930s; the 1937 Sanborn Fire Insurance maps show large homes on both sides of West Main Street near the intersection of Watts. However, by 1940, the triangular site formed by the intersection of Morgan and West Main Streets proved too...