This one is on South Pennsylvania Avenue, in front of the Marathon station at the southeast corner of Pennsylvania and Kalamazoo. It’s your basic, run-of-the-mill 1940s Department of Public Works stamp, very common around here.

Although I think of this gas station as being on Kalamazoo because it faces that way, I have learned that its street address is on Penn. It’s been a familiar sight for me for a long time, but I’ve never been inside it. I’m always headed out of town in the other direction when I stop for gas. Years ago, its canopy said MARATHON on one end and CONEY ISLAND on the other, and a sign on the side of the building dubbed it “Marathon Coney Island.” When my now-husband, then-sweetheart was first visiting me in Lansing, I drove past it while we were going somewhere, and in a bemused voice he said, “Coney Island?” I distractedly replied, “Oh yeah, I think they just have a food counter in there or something and that’s why it says that.” What I had completely forgotten is that as a New Jersey native he would be unfamiliar with the use of “Coney Island” to describe a specific kind of diner in Michigan. It occurred to me only a long time afterward that this would have sounded like a complete non sequitur. He didn’t ask for clarification at the time.

Sadly (in a way), the CONEY ISLAND banner is gone now, since it instead houses one of the locations of Jose’s Cuban Sandwich and Deli. I have had food delivered from there and it is very good. I just miss the big CONEY ISLAND letters.

The city’s online property records show that this building dates from 1964. I have a hard time imagining it as anything but a gas station, and yet I find Lansing State Journal ads from 1997 for Advanced Imaging Services Inc. at this location. Even more surprising, photos in the city’s property records seem to show that it only converted into a gas station around December 2004 (the city’s records show Advanced Imaging selling the property in July that year), and that it was vacant again by May 2008. I remember it as though it had always been the Marathon Coney Island until Jose’s moved in, but somehow it wasn’t even a gas station for the first several years I lived in town and I have no recollection of that now at all.