Gas stations are embedded in our urban and rural landscape, pervasive symbols of the automobile's domination of twentieth-century society. Like the fast-food restaurant, the motel, and the shopping mall, gas stations are buildings whose very existence was generated by the automobile. The gas station also demonstrates the extent of corporate control over our lives. On a more philosophical note, they represent what one writer has referred to as "a potential point of pause" in our unceasingly mobile culture.

Gas stations have changed over the course of the century from strictly functional to multipurpose. Their evolution allows us to glimpse the development of a consumer society in the twentieth century, fueled by the power of advertising and increasing corporatization. Early motorists purchased their gasoline by the bucket from a dry goods or hardware store. The first gas stations were simple sheds or shacks with a gas pump...