THEN & NOW

When Lewis Payne opened this fill-ing station at the point of the Gas-ton/La Vista triangle in 1925, he was well outside the city limits of Dallas, a motoring mecca even then with a Hup-mobile dealer on Harwood and a Whippet distributor on Ervay. The Lakewood shopping center, anchored by Doc Harrell’s drug store, was just beginning to sprout from its roots at the intersection of Gaston and Old Greenville Road (now Abrams). The station was a popular place to buy coal oil, get an inner tube patched, or sit around the fire and chew tobacco. Daniel’s Lakewood Gift Shop was a fixture here for many years after the station closed in the 1940s. It is now the site of A Country Garden, an upscale florist where, no doubt, tobacco chewing is strictly prohibited.