The Strange and Compelling Beauty of NJ’s Abandoned Gas Stations
And a Photographer Who’s Been Chronicling Them for Six Years
By Debbie Galant
For years, the Exxon station at the corner of Broad Street and Watchung Avenue in Bloomfield had been Erik Rank’s go-to fill-up spot when he headed into the city for photo assignments. Then it closed, and the Glen Ridge-based photographer began to notice abandoned gas stations everywhere — not just in New Jersey, but around the country.
A commercial and fine arts photographer, Rank found the shuttered pumps aesthetically interesting, and mulled it as a possible personal project, but he didn’t hop out of his car to shoot one until the night of Dec. 15, 2009. He was coming home from a photo shoot in New York City, when he noticed the old Bloomfield Exxon again.
“It was a cold crisp December night,” he recalls. “And I said, I’ve got to do this. It was freezing. I got back and I loved the picture.”
Since then, Rank says, he’s stopped his car about 100 times to record an out-0f-business gas station — and about 40 of his photos are of stations in New Jersey. He calls it the No Gas Series, and has posted much of the series on his website.
“Some of these are kind of beautiful,” he says.
It wasn’t until he heard a piece by Sarah Gonzalez on WNYC in early December, part of the launch of our Dirty Little Secrets collaborative investigation, that Rank realized that what he was seeing above the ground correlated with an even bigger story underground: filling stations sitting atop gallons of toxic sludge, some of it so expensive to remediate that owners just walked away.
All of the gas stations captured in Rank’s “No Gas” series stand frozen in time — some even showing the price of gas at the point of closure. One station that Rank photographed in Vernon still had coffee cups sitting inside the windows. “It’s like they just left yesterday.”
“The abandoned aesthetic,” he muses. “What attracts me to that?”
Mark Moran, co-publisher of Weird NJ, which has specialized in documenting New Jersey relics since 1989, has some ideas.
“There’s the time capsule factor,” he begins. Also “the appeal of not knowing what’s inside” and the palpable feeling that “someone just turned off the lights and walked away.”
But even more intriguing, Moran thinks, is how fast nature takes buildings back. “There’s something about watching the way nature reclaims something,” he says. “It’s a tangible example of how temporary we are.”
Preservationists and students of architectural history also find old gas stations interesting — for different reasons. In this monograph, The Preservation and Reuse of Historic Gas Stations, the National Parks Service argues that the abandoned buildings tell an important story.
They are one of America’s most common commercial building types and are emblematic of the twentieth century. Surviving historic stations are physical reminders of the transportation revolution and the influence of increased mobility on the landscape. They are a reflection of car culture, pop culture, corporate standardization, and an era of customer service that today seems quaint.
The paper promotes re-use and includes a photo of the first Ben and Jerry’s Scoop Shop, fashioned from an abandoned gas station in 1978. A long section at the end warns about environmental considerations, but points out that “tax credits, abatements, and other tax incentives” as well as federal Brownfields money may be available to offset the costs.
Rank also wonders if his photographs might have some commercial viability, and is contemplating an exhibit.
“Would people want them on their wall?” he asks. That remains to be seen.
This story is part of Dirty Little Secrets, a series investigating New Jersey’s toxic legacy. Participating news partners include New Jersey Public Radio/WNYC,WHYY, NJTV, NJ Spotlight, Jersey Shore Hurricane News, WBGO, New Brunswick Today and the Rutgers Department of Journalism and Media Studies. The collaboration is facilitated by The Center for Investigative Reporting, with help from the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State.
Debbie Galant is director of the NJ News Commons, based at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State.
