Tuomy Hills Service Station

Built for brother and sister Cornelius W. and Kathryn Tuomy, the former Tuomy Hills service station is a particularly intact and well preserved example of the early generation of professionally designed gasoline stations built in response to the public reaction against earlier ones that all too often were ramshackle and disreputable-looking and viewed as eyesores. Tuomy Hills was part of a new generation of stations, designed to be attractive and architecturally distinctive and to inspire the confidence of the public in the product they sold. The Elizabethan form of the service station embodies a domestic appearance that complemented the character of nearby real estate developments on the former Tuomy farm. Designed by the architectural firm of Fry and Kasurin, the Tuomy Hills Service Station was opened in 1928. The owners reported that the building required three months to erect. The Tuomys' grandparents migrated to Washtenaw County from Ireland in the 1830s. Their father, Cornelius, and mother, Julia Kearney, owned a family farm of 214 acres in the southeastern portion of what is today the city of Ann Arbor. The family home was located up the road from the service station, at 2117 Washtenaw Avenue, and it later became the headquarters of the Historical Society of Michigan. In the 1920s, Cornelius ('Bill') and Kathryn Tuomy founded a real estate company, Tuomy and Tuomy, to subdivide and develop portions of their property. The firm continued to build single-family homes on the property down to the 1960s. The houses were built in the Tudor Revival style, which was very popular in early 20th Century domestic architecture. It was popular in commercial architecture also, and it was in this style that the gas station was built. The story of how and in what context the service station was built is fascinating, revealing business acumen as well as aspects of the transportation history of the era. By 1924, a paved road, Washtenaw Avenue, ran southeastward from Ann Arbor to Ypsilanti, providing a direct route to Detroit. In 1927 the state completed a new highway, Stadium Boulevard, which intersected Washtenaw Avenue on Ann Arbor's southeast side and formed a connection around the city's south and west sides between it and Jackson Road, the city's main route west toward Jackson, Kalamazoo, and eventually Chicago. Stadium Boulevard was constructed not only to provide a direct connection between those two highways that took traffic around downtown Ann Arbor but also to provide a direct route to the new University of Michigan Football Stadium, which was built alongside it in 1926-27 and opened in October, 1927. Construction of the 72,000-seat stadium was necessitated by the huge crowds drawn by a succession of highly successful football seasons at Michigan under the reign of coach Fielding Yost in the mid-1920s. Stadium Boulevard west of Washtenaw Avenue crossed the Tuomy farm and the Tuomys owned the property in the angle between these two important routes. A more perfect site for a gas station would have been difficult to find. The Tuomy Hills Service Station opened as a Standard Oil station in late July 1928. The Tuomy Hills station falls within a genre of gas stations built in a residential style to show that a business could blend gracefully into a residential area. It was unobtrusive within the new neighborhood developing around the Tuomy farm. With sixteen-inch thick walls of brick and stone, the station was built to last. Stones were obtained from the Tuomy farm for building material. The station was equipped with six gas pumps--three on each side of the building. The roof is authentic slate and hand hewn oak pillars supported the porte-cocheres that protected the gas pumps. There is a large stone chimney that once connected to the pot-bellied stoves inside. One was for the office and one was in the upstairs loft. Architects for the station were the Ann Arbor firm of Fry and Kasurin. Lynn W. Fry, born in Grand Rapids in 1894, received his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Michigan in 1917. He accepted a commission in the artillery and fought in France during WWI. In 1919, he married Inez R. Hayes, an Ann Arbor resident, and was employed in 1919-1921 with Van Leyen, Schilling, Keough and Reynolds, Architects, in Detroit. In 1921, Fry became the State Architect for the state of Michigan, a position that lasted until 1925, when he returned to private practice and set up an office with Paul Kasurin. The two were a well-suited team: Kasurin was the chief designer and Fry was responsible for all the engineering aspects of a project. The partnership lasted until 1942 when Lynn Fry accepted a position at the University of Michigan as director of plant extension. In 1945, he became the first university architect, and served in that position until his retirement in 1965. Paul Kasurin was born in Helsinki, Finland, and studied at the Technical University there. He joined his older brother, John, in New York City. (After studying at the School of Beaux Arts in Paris, John had fled Finland to avoid conscription/imprisonment by the Czar.) Paul studied design at Columbia University and the two brothers came to Detroit where John designed the interiors of Henry Ford's residence. In 1919, they won first prize in the architectural competition for Highland Park's Civic Center. Paul married Hannah Ford Bragg, a widow with two children, and they moved to Ann Arbor. His stepson, Stanley Reese Bragg, who later became an architect, was a high school student and part-time employee of the Fry and Kasurin firm at the time the Tuomy Hills gas station was designed. In addition to the Tuomy Hills gas station, Paul Kasurin designed many buildings in Ann Arbor during his association with Lynn Fry, among them the First National Bank Building, Slauson Middle School, Northside Elementary, the Women's Athletic Building in Palmer Field, Ann Arbor Bank, remodeling of State Savings Bank and an addition to Ann Arbor High School. The Tuomy Hills Service Station was leased by Tuomy and Tuomy to the Standard Oil Company (later split into Exxon and Mobil). The company was so proud of the design that they arranged for a model of it to be displayed in 1933 at the Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago. Despite the Depression, the entire Kasurin family traveled to Chicago for the event. In 1966, after the death of Bill Tuomy, Amoco purchased the station. Until it was closed by Amoco on August 1, 1987, Tuomy Hills was the oldest continually operated gas station in Ann Arbor. Responding to a rumor that Amoco wanted to demolish or seriously alter the station, the Ann Arbor Historic District Commission placed it on the city's Register of Historic Places.

The former Tuomy Hills Service Station in Ann Arbor was constructed in 1928. It is a multi-level fieldstone-walled building of Elizabethan inspiration with a side-gable main section and gabled porches that once housed the gas pump drive-throughs projecting at right angles to the front and rear. The station stands in the angle where Washtenaw Avenue and Stadium Boulevard, both important thoroughfares on Ann Arbor's southeast side, intersect. The difference in elevation between the two roads dictated the multi-level design of the building, both inside and outside. The ground slopes downward from Washtenaw to Stadium; thus ground level for the rear drive-through fronting on Stadium is half a story below the front drive-through facing Washtenaw. The station's sixteen-inch thick walls are built of uncoursed fieldstone in various shapes, sizes, and hues. Slate--in a variety of hues, but no particular pattern--clads all portions of the one-on-one pitched roof. The Washtenaw-facing drive-through gable displays a stucco-and-half-timber facade, while the Stadium drive-through presents a jerkinhead gable with horizontal weatherboarding in the gable itself. Square-hewn paired timber posts with knee braces support the drive-through roofs. The side-gable main section features a massive, projecting chimney stack at one end and a broad bay window in the center of the other. Foundations and the first floor are of poured-in-place concrete. The upstairs had two low-ceilinged rooms; rumor has it that they were used to board University of Michigan students whom Tuomy hired to work at the station in exchange for wages. However, since this was not a permissible use, it was stated that this space was to allow his workers to take naps. Although it is not known if the toilets are original, significant additions to the building are not apparent. Interior wood paneling, a suspended ceiling, replacement doors and various mechanical/electrical systems were added over the years. A concrete block auto shop building was added to the site at a later date, but was not attached to the original building.