"The most beautiful gas station in greater Toronto," is what National Post columnist Peter Kuitenbrouwer called it in a column this week about the changing face of Lakeshore communities across the GTA.
With its unique swooping concrete canopy, the station was dubbed by Kuitenbrouwer, "the Mona Lisa of gas stations, its smile seductively upturned."
Hundreds of Mississaugans use the station every day and probably think of it as a little dishevelled and dumpy.
It's unlikely they give the undulating roof much thought, unless they have one of those vehicles that's so high that you can't use the pumps in the centre island without worrying about scraping the paint off the roof, or worse, getting wedged underneath the canopy.
The sinuous swoop of the Canadian Tire gas station canopy was once a fixture on the GTA landscape, but the signature stations are slowly being taken out of commission.
"It's vernacular architecture," John Martins-Manteiga, curator of the Dominion Modern Museum, told Kuitenbrouwer. "When you saw it, you knew you were driving up to Canadian Tire rather than Sunoco or Texaco. They've been disappearing fast and furious."
A spokesperson for Canadian Tire squelched rumours that the gas bar site — left an orphan when the accompanying Canadian Tire store moved to a new plaza at the southwest corner of Southdown Rd. and Royal Windsor Dr. — will be demolished and re-fitted with a modern new station.
jstewart@mississauga.net
