Greg Prichard’s 2019 illustrated essay in Hidden City about the Atlantic Gas Station/Pyramid on City Avenue (City Line, if you prefer) is as good as it gets for Main Line nostalgia buffs who also happen to be architecture/design geeks.
Prichard takes us from the 1952 icebox-style station that predated Vincent Kling’s bleeding-edge, “modern temple of petrol, resembling the set of a Sixties-era science fiction TV show,” to the “unusual sight [that] began to rise on the edge of Philadelphia in 1964.”
Then he explains how Atlantic became Arco, and Arco became part of Sun Oil. And the pyramid didn’t fit with Sun Oil’s corporate design scheme. By 1991, Sun had applied for a permit to demolish the Pyramid. The preservationist fought it, but as the Inquirer’s May 6, 1993 headline noted, their fight had “run out of fuel.”
