SHELL

[3437-47 Fort Hamilton Parkway, Boro Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Granted, it’s only a tax photograph, but it’s beautifully composed, with the long lines of the pavement below and the long line of the wire above, all moving toward to the station; the pipes and telephone pole projecting upward; and the globes atop the pumps (SHELL) and the clock. And the hatted man, hand in pocket, moving toward the camera. I am imagining him as Max von Mayerling, lost in Brooklyn, walking back to the car to tell Madame (Norma Desmond) that it will be a long drive back to Los Angeles.

The tax records give 1930 as the approximate date of this station’s construction. In 1931, the station was briefly in the news, as one of twenty-five Brooklyn gas stations robbed by a trio of young men. In 1949 the station appeared in New York State court records, when a station owner petitioning for a variance to expand cited the history of this Shell station to support his petition:

[Click for a larger view.]

So by 1947 this smart little station was already larger.

In 2022 the corner of Fort Hamilton Parkway and Chester Avenue is still a Shell station. At some future point someone may look at this photograph and say “That was what gas stations looked like.”

Related reading
More OCA posts with photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives