Nuns saves Mies

A shuttered modernist gas
station gets a reprieve

A MOTORIZED OASIS: Old Esso station

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Twenty or so years ago, the elegant, overlooked and now officially protected Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed Esso station on Nuns’ Island was almost incinerated by a couple of idiot friends of mine. The bizarre episode, my friend S. writes in an e-mail, unfolded like this: “One of us had the brilliant idea to dispose of our empty Everfresh juice bottles by trying to build a Molotov cocktail with some Supreme gasoline. Objective: just to see if it works and overcome our boredom.” Against the advice of their colleague manning the station’s depanneur, they filled a bottle up, soaked a rag in gas, lit it and then whipped it against the station’s back wall. The predictable happened. The bottle exploded, causing a larger-than-anticipated explosion, “almost reaching the highly flammable roof.” Surprised by the flames’ violence, they quickly doused them with an extinguisher. Then they did it again.

What they didn’t know, being teenagers, was that they were being filmed by the station’s security camera (although S. says he knows their colleague squealed on them). Their boss found out, and they were offered to either resign or be fired. They resigned.

The venerable station, built in 1968-’69, survived the ill-thought-out Molotov cocktail incident, but is now closed. It ceased operations late last year as the island’s population swelled north and eastward in this decade and the last as money and condos and McMansions flooded in, and a new, state-of-the-art station opened closer to the main boulevard that leads into the city. Nevertheless, it’s considered a gem, designed by one of the greatest architects of the 20th century. A new Verdun borough-sponsored plan will turn the station into a cultural centre, to be known as the “Maison des générations,” once Imperial Oil decontaminates the land it occupied for 40 years. Zoning and other issues have yet to be worked out, but Verdun mayor Claude Trudel told La Presse last month that, “according to a survey last year, 73 per cent of Nuns’ Island residents agreed with the idea.”

Joseph Hillel, a Montreal filmmaker whose 2003 movie Ordinaire ou Super examined the German-born architect’s work, says the Nuns’ Island gas station was “the only station he ever did. It’s very functional. It’s the only one of its kind. It’s unique among Mies’s buildings, but at the same time, it has his signature.” The clean, elegant lines and plate-glass windows are exemplary of his minimalist approach to free-flowing movement and social spaces—better seen and bigger in scope in Montreal in his design of Westmount Square.

“Try to find another one like it,” says McGill adjunct professor of architecture Howard Davies. The contrast between it and modern gas stations, “with their emphasis on branding and signage,” is evident, as is its functionality. “In its earliest proposals, it’s more of a hybrid between a public space and a gas station,” he says. “He imagined people getting out of their cars, and hanging out on benches.” With the lowered scale and tasteful landscaping, he calls it a “motorized oasis.”

Not that most people saw it as such. Hillel spent a week there when he was working on his film, asking drivers what they thought of the gas station. “I never saw so many Lamborghinis and Ferraris and Bentleys and other luxury cars,” he says. “I asked these wealthy bourgeoisie if they knew about Mies, and none of them did. I think maybe one out of 10 said they’d heard something about it.”