The gas station at the corner of Lafayette and East Houston Streets in SoHo is an industrial outpost in a Manhattan neighborhood of luxury lofts and even more luxurious shopping. It has existed on the corner for decades — first as Gaseteria, later as BP, but nearly always selling gas. For cabdrivers, it was a way station in an unruly city, where they could fill up, use the restroom, or kneel for afternoon prayers on one of the communal kilims the owner let them keep stowed beside the convenience mart.

It closed on Thursday, to be replaced by a glass-and-steel luxury office building, turning some four square miles at the southern end of the borough into a gasoline desert. Today, the only reminder that this stretch of SoHo was once a forest of filling stations known as Gasoline Alley is a coffee shop of the same name that sells single-origin coffee beans from Burundi.

The closing of the inelegant station, its shabby convenience store invariably full of drivers dancing in place while waiting in line for the restroom, has a familiar feeling. As New York City’s molten property values have made selling off a parcel of land often more profitable than operating the grocery, hardware store or gas station sitting on it, the gas station’s passing appears to be the latest example of a common trope. And while Amazon and FreshDirect may fill the hole when the corner store goes condo, there is no doubt it is getting harder in Manhattan to get many of the basics that make life livable.

What happens now if you are downtown and the needle is on E?

“It’s not going to be easy for the drivers, and the people who are using this facility,” Sunkanmi Alaka, a cabdriver, said as he waited for the restroom a few days before the station closed. “You’re going to travel miles before you see a gas station.”