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Embassy Gulf Service Station

Year
1937
Style
Neoclassical
City
Washington, DC
Collection
the city beautiful
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The Embassy Gulf Service Station at 2200 P Street NW was built in 1937 as Gulf Oil Corporation's 61st filling station in Washington, designed by company architect P. L. R. Hogner as part of a deliberate push to make gas stations look like banks and libraries rather than gas stations. Because the site sits next to Rock Creek Park, its design was reviewed by the Commission of Fine Arts, the National Park Service, and the National Capital Park and Planning Commission before construction.

the building

Stone to match the church opposite. The final design called for a small building of grey stone chosen to match the color of the church standing opposite the station on P Street, an attempt at neighborhood harmony unusual for the building type.

the style

Built in the Neoclassical style at a moment when Gulf Oil was reworking its stations nationally to read as civic buildings rather than commercial ones — banks and libraries were the explicit models — the station's classical detailing was corporate strategy as much as taste.

More on Neoclassical

significance

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 30, 1993, and still in use as a service station — a surviving example of Gulf's 1930s campaign to disguise its stations as genteel civic buildings.

nearby

All 315 buildings in Washington, DC