The City of Lakewood has a thing for moving and restoring old buildings, though. Take a walk around the city's Heritage Lakewood Belmar Park, and you'll see a schoolhouse from the ’20s, a farmhouse from the ’30s and a diner that dates back to the ’40s.
And now, from 1954, Heritage Lakewood has an authentic gas station, from the prices to the pumps. And it all started in a lot full of junk behind Coors Field. Or in 1926, 69 years before the ballpark opened, if we're being thorough.
According to Heritage Lakewood Museum curator Katy Lewis, the park's new feature, dubbed the Peerless Gas Station, was likely built in the ’30s or ’40s and operated into the ’50s, based on the construction style. She and her colleagues can confirm the station was originally crafted by Peerless Sheet Metal Works, a Denver construction company founded in 1926.
Peerless Sheet Metal was founded by the father of Joseph Rosenthal, Heritage Lakewood's research shows. Rosenthal eventually took over the business and built a reputation for metal and tin buildings in the area, especially gas stations and car dealerships.
But that's where knowledge of the gas station's origin ends.
"That's a great question. I wish we knew," Lewis says when asked about the gas station's original location. "It was moved to Heritage Lakewood around 2011, and at that point, one of our staff members had just seen it in a junkyard behind Coors Field."
So Heritage Lakewood hauled the shell of this mystery gas station to a shed at Belmar Park, where it sat until another pair of keen eyes came across it. Chuck Houser, who owns and restores gas stations in Colorado, was walking around the park with his family when he noticed the gas station and its withering pumps.
"He reached out to us and asked if we thought about restoring them, and if we'd like him to. He really knows what he's doing, so we took him up on it," Lewis says. "He did a wonderful jump on restoring [the pumps]."
The Peerless Gas Station has a cloudy origin story, but Lakewood historians believe it operated on Colfax Avenue.
City of Lakewood
"We call it a rehabilitation instead of a restoration because we don't know exactly what it looked like," Lewis explains, but she and the rehab staff had plenty of images of other Peerless projects as resources. Through their research, they believe the gas station was located somewhere on East Colfax Avenue.
The Peerless Gas Station is now part of Heritage Lakewood's Colfax Hub, which includes other classic structures that represent past decades on the Denver area's longest and most colorful street. Other buildings of a similar era in the Colfax Hub include the White Way Grill, Gil, Ethel's Barbershop and Beauty Salon and the Estes Motel, which Heritage Lakewood scooped up after a developer bought the classic property on West Colfax and Kipling Street.
The mid-century architecture is a fun dose of nostalgia or peek into the past, depending on the age of the visitor, and speaks to the post-World War II period, Lewis adds.
"We figured it was good for our site, and it's representative of the time period," she says. "It's sort of like looking back into the way things were and comparing that to how gas prices have changed, how the area developed or how the architecture changed."
Since celebrating the Peerless Gas Station's reopening on October 1, Heritage Lakewood has been visited frequently by owners of historic vehicles who want to take photos of their classic cars next to a vintage gas station," Lewis notes. It's also been a hot spot during recent events around Belmar, like Lakewood's Cider Days.
Don't think about filling up your tank, though, because this gas station is for educational purposes and community visits or events only.
Heritage Lakewood has fifteen historic buildings overall. A ten-year project that began in 2017 calls for the museum and park to restore and rehabilitate the relics they've collected over the years. In addition to its windows back to Colfax, the museum has worked with the Colorado School of Mines to restore a couple of vintage Caterpillar tractors.
One day Lewis hopes to restore a train for children that ran through the Westland Mall in the ’60s.
"It's a really cool little wooden train, and we'd love to get that running around the sight at some point," she says. "One of our goals is to restore those places and items and make them more usable for our community."
Self-guided walking tours of Heritage Lakewood are free, and a handful of guided tours can be scheduled for a small fee through the visitor center.
