I have been taking photos of repurposed gas stations and posting them here since about 2013.

My favorite remains the first one that caught my eye and got me started: Goobers Laundromat in Lucedale, Mississippi.

As a structure, it’s not much, sort of ramshackle and lacking the classic lines of most of the the old gas stations I’ve encountered since.

But as a concept, particularly the name and the use of the former pump island as a raised planting area, it grabbed me, hard.

Since then I have photographed hundreds of recycled, empty and falling apart gas stations all over the U.S. and even internationally, if you count a three-day jaunt across a lower bit of Canada and a two-week trip to Ethiopia.

The major reuse of old stations is definitely for auto repair shops and used car lots. Those are so common I don’t even bother photographing them any more, unless there is something really unique about the building.

A popular runnerup seems to be as pizza restaurants and I titled this post Pizza Pizza in honor of these two I found recently in Charlotte, NC.  Both of them make good use of the old overhangs as outdoor seating areas.

And just in case the title of this post is ringing a bell and you can’t figure out why, here it is: Pizza! Pizza!, said quickly with the words run together, was a long-running advertising slogan for the Little Caesars pizza chain.

That catchphrase, coined in 1979, twenty years after the company was founded, was meant to convey that the price for one of its competitors’ pies would buy you two pizzas at Little Caesars. And they came in that unwieldy, long, two-pizza box inside a long paper bag.

Have you noticed, by the way, that the Caesar character in the chain’s advertising has lost his chest hair? And that the design on his togo now contains the letters L and C instead of being just a random pattern?

Then

Now

And as long as we’re knee-deep in the trivia weeds, I should note that the chain cannot use its Pizza! Pizza! catchphrase in Canada. A company there, Pizza Pizza, founded in 1967, years before Caesars thought that up, objected.

So in our neighbor to the north, the company uses “Two Pizzas!” along with “Delivery! Delivery!”, “Quality! Quality!” or other such double-word tag lines.

Other former gas stations selling pizzas and the rest of my finds from my recent jaunt through Georgia, the Carolinas, the Virginias and Pennyslvania are here.

And no pizza post would be complete without me confessing that I do love pizza and always have.  So much so that back when I started calling my daughter Jennifer Juice because of her love of apple juice I became known as Papa Pizza.