A retro throwback to the space age on a Mississauga artery is perhaps the coolest gas station in the Greater Toronto Area, a vestige of a bygone design era increasingly threatened by change.

Or, depending on your level of architectural and historic appreciation, it might just be another place to fill up your tank before a long haul on the QEW.

Regardless of your stance, the Canadian Tire Gas Station at 1212 Southdown Road is, for better or worse, one of Ontario's last remaining relics of Googie architecture.

The Googie style was born in Southern California and rapidly spread across the continent in the 1950s and '60s — an era obsessed with the future and surrounded by radical technological advancements like the rise of automobile culture and the overlapping dawns of the jet age, the nuclear age and the space race.

Though Ontario is far from the style's origin points in the Los Angeles area, the rapid rise of the car in the mid-20th century was built on a heavily stylized and idealized image of a clean, futuristic suburban life, one that quickly took hold on the outskirts of major Canadian cities.

As the main built-form expression of auto infrastructure, gas stations were the perfect mechanism to convey these ideals to the masses, using architecture to reinforce the idea that the car was the way of the future. 

The Southdown Rd. gas station's form is a great example of the style in its toned-down form. Designed by architect Bob McClintock and built in 1968, it boasts a concave swooping roof propped up by two pairs of canted columns, its underside ribbed with evenly spaced bands of horizontal fluorescent lighting tubes.

View of the Southdown Road gas station in 2022. Photo from Google Street View.

When the Southdown gas station was showing signs of age in the 2000s and due for replacement, the City of Mississauga stepped in and recommended Canadian Tire explore heritage preservation. The canopy was ultimately designated under the Ontario Heritage Act in January 2011, with restoration work following later that year.

The process to save and restore the gas station saw heritage preservation efforts led by Oakville-based ATA Architect Inc., a job that would ultimately win the firm an Award of Merit for its contribution to saving the retro landmark.

Surviving Googie gas stations have become something of a curiosity across North America in recent years, and while the lost architectural language is now revered in places like California, where the style was most prolific, it is endangered north of the border as more of these expressive structures are lost to neglect and time.

At one point, 30 of these swooping gas bars featuring McClintock's design could be found from across Ontario, though only two remain in the province as of 2024 — a sad testament to the lack of appreciation for Googie architecture north of the 49th parallel.

The gas station pictured in 2024. Photo by CGW1208.

An almost identical gas station was constructed one year before the Southdown Road location in 1968, not too far away near the western edge of Toronto. Sadly, and in complete and utter disregard for the lost architectural style, the similar space-age-style gas bar next to a Canadian Tire location at 2025 Kipling Avenue was demolished in 2022.

Its last days, subsequent demolition, and the aftermath of the teardown were captured in passes by Google Street View cars in 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Another identical Canadian Tire gas bar still exits in Hamilton at 314 Main Street East, while a fourth Ontario location at 135 West Street South in Orillia was replaced with an updated design decades earlier.

This may just be a gas station, but it's representative of a threatened style that deserves far more appreciation in Ontario.