OTTAWA CITIZEN, By Andrew King

There's an old cottage in Westboro that looks as though it should be overlooking the water or tucked away in some secluded forest. Instead, it's passed by countless motorists each day as they navigate one of the busiest intersections of the city.

The "cottage" is a little yellow gas station at the corner of Island Park Drive and Richmond Road, a hub for throngs of interprovincial commuters who clog the road on their way to and from the Champlain Bridge. Once indispensable for west-end Ottawa motorists, this quaint corner gas station is an architectural rarity.

Built in 1934, it's an example of the kind of building needed to dispense gasoline to the then-somewhat new and increasingly popular transportation device known as the automobile.

In the 1920's, curb-side gas pumps downtown were being replaced by drive-in filling stations in the suburbs as more people began to buy cars and move to the outskirts of the city. These new gas stations were created by oil companies who wanted their gas stations to blend into residential neighbourhoods so they built them to resemble the houses that would surround them.

Only a few of these cottage gas stations remain in North America, and the United States recently designated their surviving examples on the National Register of Historic Places.

Recently vacated and sitting empty, our unusual cottage gas station property has been purchased by a Toronto developer, Main and Main.

The structure resembles an old  English cottage, with its rounded doorway and windows, steeply pitched roof and chimneys, similar to many of the older homes along Island Park Drive. The architectural style of the gas station is known as "Tudor Revival" and was created by the American architect Carl-August Petersen, who was hired by the Pure Oil comany in the 1920s. His designs featured canopied windows and stuccoed walls. Like Ottawa's example, the stations were built during the growth period of the automobile, which eventually shaped the North American streetscape as we know it today.

Hoping to learn more about the station...

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