News and notes from Reston (tm).

Monday, July 8, 2013

Flashback Monday: A Company Town

gas station.jpg

Set the Earth-Toned Wayback Machine to the late 1960s, an era when our beloved earth-toned community was still the plaything of a multinational petrochemical conglomerate, which was trying to diversify beyond that cheap bubbling crude that back in the day just poured out of the ground, without fracking or a bunch of fun land wars in sandy countries. At a piddly 24 cents a gallon, how could you possibly make money on that stuff? Volume, son, volume. So along with dabbling in real estate, and deposing our Dear Leader, Gulf made sure that if residents of its planned community were going to buy gas, by gum, they'd buy gas from Gulf -- or face a long drive down a two-lane road to somewhere inside that new-fangled "Beltway" if they wanted some hi-test from another purveyor. This stylishly shot piece of commercial photography was just icing on the cake, a reminder of the limited choices in what was then a company town.

In the far right of the photo, you can catch a corner of the (otherwise) roundish Crescent Apartments, which, like the gas station itself, may be in for a bit of a change in the years ahead. But then it was all rounded curves and modern apartment living, with a spot to refuel that stylish four-ton land yacht coupe just down the hill, the end.


  1. Forget trying to entice all that high-tech IT crap to relocate here. What Reston really needs is something like the Pickett Road tank farm in Mantua. That is just the kind of heavy industry street cred we need.

  2. You exaggerate, Restonian. There was no need to schlep all the way to the nascent Tyson's area in order to get High Test. You could always buy it from the Venezuelans at the Citgo station in Herndon, which used to be located right across the street from Town Hall and the Pool Hall.

