If you visit Liberty Station at 2101 Washington Avenue in the Old Sixth Ward, you can't get an oil change but you can get a fill-up. The neighborhood hangout and bar was originally designed as an Humble Oil & Refining Company gas station by John F. Staub, one of Houston’s most respected residential architects. (Humble Oil later became Exxon.) “Staub prepared a prototype design for gas stations for [Humble Oil],” said Stephen Fox, who has written extensively about Staub’s homes. “Humble seems to have built many examples in the areas it served during the first half of the 1930s.”
Photo: Flickr user Exquisitely Bored in Nacogdoches.
Staub likely imagined the station, number 179, as a brief stop for motorists, but in its new form patrons are encouraged to linger and enjoy themselves. Two glass-paned garage doors are open most days and look out onto the concrete patio from the bar. If shade is more your style, there is a covered option a few feet away from the main room inside.
Most of Staub's residential work is in Houston's prestigious River Oaks neighborhood, and many of those homes, such as the Ima Hogg mansion (now the Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens), have become museums. “The identifying characteristics of Staub's architecture are imagination and rigor of planning and design, exquisite proportion, and precise detail,” Fox said. Hints of the designer’s original work peek from under the surface of the station's gray and white paint, though most bricks are left bare. "Staub was especially remembered for the decorative tile work with which he detailed the Humble gas stations," Fox said.
Andrew Jackson Wray House by John F. Staub at 3 Remington Lane. Photo: HAR.
An intricate tile border laid like many triangular reflections in the short narrow hall through the front door holds you for a moment, and other tile work can also be seen along the walls near the base of the floor. From there, the main room opens to your left, and though the design is pleasant, Liberty Station is meant for you to walk inside and rest for a while with friends and a drink.
Walk a little farther and the bar opens up. Edison bulbs hang above in small cages like captured ideas. The garages, now glass, were once an opaque painted metal, if the black-and-white picture above the threshold is any indication. What is now the front door was once a narrow window. The covered seating outside with a large flat-screen TV and rotating fans is where the gas pumps used to be. The door that leads out to it is in the same spot. If you spill anything the floors are concrete, and no one's going to worry about the ring of condensation left behind on the picnic table outside.
To the left of the bar is another threshold, the second entrance into the main room. There are two foosball tables, an arcade console where you can play a game of Ms. Pac-Man or Galaga for a quarter, and seating that is closer to the building's original age in different colors and patterns are arranged around the room. Artwork for sale hangs on the red brick walls, and some of it refers to the location's roots with painted trucks and automobiles.
Liberty Station will be opening its doors this Sunday, June 1, to Houston’s Sunday Streets festival from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The portion of Washington Avenue between Studemont and Milam streets, which includes the bar, will be closed to motor vehicles and opened to visitors on foot, bikes, skates and boards.
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Read all OffCite posts on Sunday Streets HTX; read the entry, with more photos, on this building in Houston Deco.
