Courtesy of City Comforts comes the following news:
The only gas station ever designed and built by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, a 1958 building in Cloquet, Minn., is on the market.
The building’s owners, the McKinney family of Cloquet, put the still-operating station up for sale in August. So far, no potential buyers have come forward. The McKinneys are asking $725,000 for the property, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985….
“The building is at risk because no protective easements exist for it,” says Ron Scherubel, executive director of the Chicago-based Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, which has listed the structure for sale on its Web site. “Of course, we’d like to see it stay as intact as possible. In the best-case scenario, someone would buy it and keep using it as a gas station. The next-best-case scenario would involve a good adaptive reuse.”…
The station has a glass-walled observation lounge, skylights over the service bays, a copper cantilevered canopy that juts out over the front of the building, and a futuristic tower perched on its top. In Wright’s original design, the gasoline hoses were designed to come out of the roof, a feature the local fire department subsequently vetoed. The structure cost $75,000 to build–almost three times more than an average late-1950s service station.
Click here for the full story, including a way cool photo.