By Alan Pinho Ocean Park
I really enjoy reading all the historical articles regarding Santa Monica.
I grew up in Ocean Park during the 40s and am still here today. Dad had a repair shop on the northeast corner of Main and Marine Streets in the Carlton Hotel parking lot. My brother had the Richfield on the northwest corner of Main and Marine Streets (now a parking lot). Where Patagonia now resides was our neighborhood market. Up in Santa Monica we had a shop across from Sears as well as at Third Street and Colorado Avenue until it was destroyed to build the Santa Monica Place mall in the late 70s.
Here’s one story that seems to surprise most people. On the southwest corner of Fourth Street and Colorado Avenue sits the original Sears gas station. This may be the last Sears station of this type left in the U.S. and it’s in perfect condition. These buildings were all torn down no later that the 60s and replaced with a more modern version. In this case, the brick building across the street was built instead just before the freeway cut through town in the mid 60s.
The canopy sticking out from the front of the building (facing Colorado) covers where the gas pumps were. On the back (south side of the building) is a roll up door. That’s how the car got inside to be worked on. There was a Texaco, Shell and (my dad’s) Signal across the street that had been there for years. Sears stopped selling gas when the new building was completed.
Remember the Allstate car you could buy from the Sears and Roebuck catalog? It was really a Kaiser Henry J, with an Allstate emblem. There are Allstate collectors that have websites. If you would like to see what the car looks like, type in something like “Allstate car". Their cars were very basic and were only made to last a couple of years.
You could also buy a prefab Sears (Craftsmen) house in the catalog and assemble it in a couple of days on your vacant lot... but that’s another story.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 2, 2007. Read the original PDF.