Historic gas station at 20th and Arch is being relocated to Fairmount Park

At 20th and Arch Streets, perched on the edge of a vast surface parking lot, sits a nearly 100-year-old Gulf gas station done up in Spanish terra-cotta trappings.

This vacant remnant of the early age of mass automobile ownership is protected by historic preservation regulations. It also stands in the way of the new 18-story office tower designed for insurance giant Chubb Ltd.

That’s why the 200-square-foot structure is going to be moved from its present location to the area around the Sedgley Porter House in Fairmount Park’s Lemon Hill section.

“The structure will be preserved and, while placed in an ahistorical context, it’s going to remain publicly usable,” said Patrick Grossi, director of advocacy for the Preservation Alliance of Philadelphia.

» READ MORE: The forgotten history of Philadelphia’s early gas stations | Inga Saffron

The move will cost the Parkway Corp., which is developing Chubb’s office tower, well over $1 million. Later this month, Parkway plans to stabilize the building’s walls and roof, touch up the brick, and then in March transport it to its new home.

“It’s not like putting a mobile home on a flatbed on the highway,” said Brian Berson, president of Parkway Commercial Properties. “We’ve got to pick it up very, very gingerly and then drive it a couple miles down the road at one or two miles per hour. We have to move a couple traffic lights and trim some trees for headspace.”

There it will sit for an indeterminate period of time as regulatory matters with the Department of Licenses and Inspections are sorted out and utilities are set up.

Once that’s done, it will be turned into office space for the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia’s youth cycling program and the Schuylkill Navy, which champions amateur rowing on the river. Both organizations already have facilities in and around the Sedgley Porter House. The gas station will be the responsibility of the Department of Parks and Recreation. A spokesperson says it will be converted into a single meeting room.

Philadelphia hosts an unusually large number of first-generation gas stations, which were made architecturally distinct as a means of competition because their other offerings were so similar.

Many of the antiquated structures have been reused as water ice stands, although few of the others are historically protected. (The hut at 20th and Arch was almost used as a takeout hot dog restaurant in the 1980s.)

“There’s a handful of these that are still sort of hiding, and they’re cute,” Grossi said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if a different owner did not commit to relocating this thing and just sought permission to demolish it.”

That’s exactly what almost happened a couple of decades ago.

The gas station sat unused for decades at 20th and Arch, despite being historically designated in 1981. After that, a previous owner tried to donate the building to organizations like the Henry Ford Museum and SEPTA. The Fairmount Park Commission considered reusing it as a check-in booth at its recycling center on Route 76.

All those efforts failed, and demolition of the site was approved by the Historical Commission in the 1980s to make room for a large development. When that project stalled, the larger site hosted a surface parking lot.

Last year there was discussion of moving the historic gas station to Aviator Park on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, but, according to the Preservation Alliance, the proposal was scuttled over concerns that it would end up vacant and attract nuisance users.

“The original vision for bringing the facility to Aviator Park was to serve as a food concession,” said Maita Soukup, spokesperson for Parks and Recreation. “However, the small size of the historic structure meant that retrofitting it into a food service operation was not feasible or desirable.”

Parks and Recreation proposed Fairmount Park as an alternative. The Historical Commission voted to allow the building’s transferal, removing protections from the property and designating the small structure as an object — which allows it to be removed from its original context.

Parkway’s Berson admitted that he is a little mystified by the building’s historic preservation regulations. But not so bewildered that he considered trying to get around them.

“Nostalgia has value, but in a growing city, nostalgia should not be enough to impede a project the way this has,” Berson said. “However, it is a dear object to the community, and Parkway was not about to go in and argue that we should be able to knock it down.”