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Since 1965, renowned American artist Ed Ruscha has led an ambitious effort to photograph the streets of Los Angeles, producing more than a half million images, including negatives, digital files, contact sheets, and notes that are now part of the Getty Research Institute. In an essay for the new publication, Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles: City, Archive, Image, Artist, Weitzman’s Francesca Russello Ammon, associate professor of city and regional planning and historic preservation; Brian D. Goldstein, an associate professor of art history at Swarthmore College; and Garrett Dash Nelson, president and head curator, Leventhal Map & Education Center, Boston Public Library, illuminate the changing landscape along Sunset as a chronicle of US urban transformation in the late 20th century. The three authors are also the creators of Sunset Over Sunset, a digital urban humanities project that uses Ruscha’s photographs of Sunset Boulevard to uncover stories of everyday change in the postwar built environment.
Gas Stations and the Changing Geography of Energy
One microhistory that Ruscha’s photos reveal is the changing geography of everyday energy landscapes, both along and off Sunset Boulevard. Specifically, the photos show the gradual disappearance of gas stations as they shifted away from the postwar commercial boulevard to more suburban and highway-oriented locations over the late twentieth century. The images also document how former gas-station sites were gradually repurposed for alternative uses, unveiling the many life cycles of commercial land. Rather than offering a strict before-and-after story, they record a frequently multistage redevelopment process that unfolded slowly amid continuing and rapid metropolitan growth.
In 1969, the United States had 236,000 filling stations; today, about 60 percent of that number exists.(1) Sunset saw an intensification of that same trajectory, but on a smaller scale. In 1973, along the ten-mile study area, Ruscha photographed approximately forty-five gas stations; by contrast, his drive from 2007 would find that number diminished by more than two thirds.(2) In terms of location, most postwar gas stations were located on corner parcels, affording drivers multiple means of entry and exit. In fact, of all the gas stations Ruscha photographed on this ten-mile stretch, only one—8543 Sunset—was located midblock. Gas stations also commonly clustered near one another, even on adjacent properties. At 5007 and 5025 Sunset, for example, two stations occupied the entire northern stretch of the boulevard between North Mariposa and North Alexandria Avenues. Although Ruscha had not photographed this area during his drive in 1966, city directories identify gas stations at these sites since at least 1965; those uses continued through his photo shoot in 2007.(3)
When a gas station survived for an extended period at the same site, it tended to remain consistently in corporate hands, even if an individual franchise owner changed over time.(3) Chevron, successor to the Standard Oil Company of California, dominated the late twentieth-century Sunset Boulevard petroleum landscape. Texaco was close behind, and the two companies eventually merged in 2000. Other prevalent companies included ARCO, Shell, Gulf Oil, Mobil, and Union 76. Ruscha’s photographs demonstrate how the gas-station sites that endured experienced changes in signage and architecture, if not ownership. At 8101 Sunset, for example, Chevron dropped “Standard” from its signage sometime between Ruscha’s drives in 1966 and 1973. Additionally, the shape of the building’s canopy extending out from its oblong garage morphed from flat to gabled, and this form continues through today. Despite these physical changes, however, the Chevron name has remained constant.
Ed Ruscha, 6750 Sunset Boulevard, 1973 (a), digital positives from negatives. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2012.M.1 © Ed Ruscha.
More typical than the endurance of individual gas stations was their replacement with other buildings that had different uses entirely. All along Sunset Boulevard, Ruscha’s photographs reveal the processes of demolition and new construction that remade numerous parcels. Common reuses of gas-station sites included fast-food restaurants or parking lots for strip malls. For example, 6750 Sunset illustrates the constancy of change as a Union 76 gave way to a Rally’s drive-in and then a Carl’s Jr. The typical corner location of most gas stations suited these alternative uses that likewise prioritized automobile access. Paving over such sites was also an economical means to attract development to land containing toxic soil.
Former gas-station sites stand out for the periods of vacancy that they frequently experienced before construction began to transform the lots for new uses. Ruscha’s photographs are uniquely valuable for capturing these interim moments of delay and absence. The images expose the often-slow pace and process of redevelopment, rather than just the outcomes. In 1973, for example, 7980 Sunset was the site of a Shell station; by 1985, the pumps were gone and only the station’s auto repair service remained; and by 1995, Gaucho Grill operated at the site. Similarly, at 8873 Sunset, property owners demolished the entire Shell station while awaiting a new occupant. The gas station had appeared in photographs from 1966 through 1985, but Ruscha’s image from 1995 captures an empty lot. His photograph from 2007 shows a reawakened property, with construction in progress. Shortly after, a Japanese restaurant opened on the site. In another instance, 6407 Sunset was home to a Texaco when Ruscha first photographed it in 1973. By 1985, the lot had been cleared but remained vacant. A Jack in the Box was in operation there by 1995.
Ed Ruscha, 6750 Sunset Boulevard, 1995 (b), digital positives from negatives. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2012.M.1. © Ed Ruscha.
While the contamination of land on gas-station sites partially explains patterns of interim vacancy, many of the demolitions came as a result of the changing gasoline economy. In October 1973, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries imposed an embargo on the United States, yielding gasoline shortages, limits on consumer fuel purchases, and a dramatic increase in gas prices where the product was still available. In response to this evolving global market, US gasoline companies shifted their strategies from dominating market share to profitability.(4) They closed many former retail outlets as a result. One owner of an ARCO on Sunset attributed the gas station closures and rent increases to greed, but the company’s regional manager described it as “simple economics.” He explained, “If a station does a minimal volume of gas, its best use is not as a gas station.”(5) At such moments, those sites sat vacant, awaiting remediation and future occupants.
Changing gasoline retail trends further hastened the closure of postwar gas stations along landscapes like Sunset Boulevard. Many stations depicted in these photographs adjoined automobile garages. But improvements in automobile technology gradually reduced demand for these garages’ services. Meanwhile, after having banned self-service gas stations in 1948, Los Angeles legalized them in 1973. Self-service stations tended to have more pumps and paired well with convenience stores rather than auto repair shops, as occupants of the sites’ secondary buildings. Economics favored these revised uses as well.(6) Thus, by the 1980s, the space needs of gas stations were expanding, and earlier properties were becoming outdated.(7) While drivers in the early 2000s could still refuel their tanks along Sunset, Ruscha’s photographs depict an era in which the bulk of gas stations were located in higher-trafficked areas outside the dense city that were more profitable.
Caption: Ed Ruscha, 6750 Sunset Boulevard, 2007 (c), digital positives from negatives. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2012.M.1. © Ed Ruscha.
This geographic move was indicative of a larger urban shift that included highway construction and the suburbanization of housing, shopping, and industry. Gas stations, therefore, weren’t the only establishments moving away from the postwar city to outlying metropolitan areas. Southern California experienced these processes acutely following wartime growth.(8) The population of Los Angeles nearly doubled between 1950 and 2000; during that same period, however, the number of suburbanites in Southern California more than quadrupled.(9) Moreover, L.A. had the nation’s highest rate of automobile ownership.(10) With drivers increasingly located on and around L.A.’s expanding suburban highway network, gas stations followed their market, leaving Sunset Boulevard behind.
To read the excerpted chapter in full, see: “Ed Ruscha’s Street-Level View and the Postwar Redevelopment Vernacular"
1) Estimates of numbers of gas stations vary, but all sources point to a dramatic decline during this period. John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, The Gas Station in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 131; and “Service Station FAQs,” American Petroleum Institute, https://www.api.org/oil-and-natural-gas/consumer-information/consumer-resources/service-station-faqs.
2) Throughout this chapter, we derive counts of building and landscape features from the manual study of Ruscha’s photographs alongside city directories and other secondary sources; in particular, we utilize our digital project Sunset Over Sunset. We thank research assistants Dorothy-Rui Corrigan, Anna Fruman, Juliette Morfin, Calvin Nguyen, and Julian Valgora for their painstaking attention in completing this work and their thoughtful analytical contributions.
3) Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, Los Angeles Street Address Directory, July 1965.
4) John A. Jakle, “The American Gasoline Station, 1920 to 1970,” Journal of American Culture 1, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 521.
5) Jakle and Sculle, The Gas Station in America, 79–80.
6) Rick Kushman, “Government, Costs, Oil Firms Hurt,” Los Angeles Times, 10 August 1980, WS1.
7) Robert L. Bradley Jr., Oil, Gas and Government: The U.S. Experience (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996).
8) Jakle and Sculle, The Gas Station in America, 79–81.
9) Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
10) The combined statistical area includes Los Angeles County, Orange County, Riverside County, San Bernardino County, and Ventura County. Wendell Cox, “The Evolving Urban Form: Los Angeles,” New Geography, 8 August 2011, https://www.newgeography.com/content/002372-the-evolving-urban-form-los-angeles.
