About Former Gas Stations

Former Gas Stations is a community-built directory of fuel stations that have closed — and the new lives they’ve taken on. The corner station that’s now a coffee roaster, the old service bay turned taproom, the canopy sheltering a taco window: these conversions are everywhere once you start looking, and this is where we keep track of them.

Where this came from

The project grew out of our own adaptive-reuse work on Hill Street Pavilion, a former gas station we brought back to life as a gathering place. Researching its history, we kept stumbling on other stations that had been reinvented — and realized no one was collecting them in one place. So we started.

What qualifies

What we’re really documenting is the reuse — the interesting second lives of these buildings, not the buildings themselves. Two things matter: the building is still standing, and it’s now being used as something that’s a meaningful departure from its automotive origins.

We don’t try to police exactly what kind of automotive building it originally was — that’s often impossible to pin down decades later. What we do require is that it’s now genuinely something else: a coffee roaster, a taproom, a shop, an office, a home. Uses too close to the original — convenience stores, still-operating auto repair, and other fuel- or vehicle-service uses — aren’t a departure, so they don’t qualify.

• In scope: a former gas or service station still standing and meaningfully reused as something non-automotive.
• Out of scope: still-operating stations and auto-service uses; buildings so little-changed they’re effectively still in their original line of work; and demolished buildings — once it’s gone, it’s no longer part of the living collection.

How it works

Listings are submitted by visitors and reviewed by us before they appear, so the map stays accurate. Know a station we’re missing, or spot something that needs fixing? Submit a location or get in touch.