Can gas stations be historic? Mississauga thinks so.

With a canopy that soars with space age wings, the Canadian Tire gas bar on Southdown Rd. by the Clarkson GO Station in southwest Mississauga was designated a heritage structure in 2011 by the City and restored to its near-original 1968 glory after it had fallen into some disrepair.

Designed at the apex of modern car culture, before gridlock and the fuel shortages of the 1970s drained most of the romance out of owning a car, it’s a whimsical take on an everyday place that is usually anything but beautiful.

Could there be a structure as consistently ugly and malodorous as a gas station? They’re ubiquitous throughout the city, with big footprints and a toxic legacy, but they’re almost invisible, one of the places we ignore and block out of our mind. Not this one, though.

In Mississauga, the beautiful curve of concrete seems to float in mid-air; in the 1960s we could put a human on the moon and make concrete fly. The original canopy used fluorescent tubes to light the pumps below but now rows of LEDs are fixed underneath, an efficient take on an old lighting scheme that had great lines.

Built for Canadian Tire by designer and contractor Bob McClintock, it’s an example of what’s sometimes called “Googie” architecture, an ultramodern style that took off in California where the car was king and named after a coffee shop that made the style famous in Los Angeles. Googie buildings try to get as much driver attention as the signs out front do.

McClintock ultimately designed 30 variations of this particular style for Canadian Tire stores, but just a handful are still around. At Rexdale Blvd. and Kipling Ave. in Toronto a larger version of it can still be found by the existing, old-school Canadian Tire, an example of the smaller kind of store built before the company upsized to full big box. The Rexdale location is by the Pearson flight path and the jets coasting in to land above it seem quite at home in this petroleum-fuelled landscape.

A heritage gas station might sound weird, but Mississauga, a city that was created and grew rapidly in the latter-half of the 20th century, is getting a head start on preservation. Not all are so prescient of the value of these buildings: last year the City of Hamilton rejected an application to add one of McClintock’s canopy’s on Main St. E to its list of heritage properties. Hamilton’s potential loss, but a typical story: modern heritage is most at risk right now, too old to be new, too young to be widely respected.

Canadian Tire isn’t the only company that tried a little harder. On Lake Shore Blvd. E, near Windermere Ave., the Chalet-style Joy Oil gas station is whimsy from the 1930s. Though designated a heritage building and saved from redevelopment when it was moved across the street to the waterfront trail, it currently remains behind a chain-link fence, stuck in bureaucratic purgatory. If this was Berlin it would be a bar or café that lakeside visitors could enjoy.

One of the odder gas bars in Toronto is the Esso on Danforth Ave. at Greenwood Ave., where the accompanying “On The Run” convenience store, usually housed in a boring box-like building, is in the former Allenby Theatre, its 1930s art modern façade and attached marquee perpetually advertising a double feature of “Tim Hortons” and “On The Run.”

These few gems are as good as it gets for drivers who must be quite unloved by the oil companies who sell them gas in unadorned, generic surroundings that do little for the city around them.

Shawn Micallef writes every Friday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef

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