Four Nineteen Building

What is Four Nineteen Building?

The station follows the Domestic style, in which gas stations were designed to look like small houses. Its particular layout is known as “House with Canopy and Bays”: a wooden canopy on brick piers shelters the front door, and a garage bay extends on each side.

The walls are the real show. They use clinker bricks, which were fired hotter than ordinary bricks and came out swollen, dense and oddly colored. Builders once threw them away, but Chicago architects began using them in the 1920s. Here they are laid in a skintled pattern, deliberately rough, with bricks jutting in and out at different angles. Both clinker brick and skintled walls were Chicago building innovations. The parapet roof is covered in multicolored Ludowici clay tiles, a pairing architects of the time favored.

History of Four Nineteen Building

Two local real estate businessmen, William D. Meyering together with David L. Sutton, built the station in 1928. It later earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places for its architecture. Its design shows how much care went into even a small neighborhood business in that era, when a filling station was expected to fit in on a residential street.

Visiting Four Nineteen Building: tips

The building stands on East 83rd Street, roughly 7 miles from the Route 66 corridor. It is a quick photo stop best seen from the public sidewalk; no visitor access is listed, so respect the property. Look closely at the brickwork, where the uneven bricks give the walls a rough, textured look, and at the colored roof tiles above.