It’s the end of an era in Myers Park: A beloved full-service gas station is set to close
It’s long been a familiar sight to the thousands of motorists who trundle along Providence Road just north of the intersection at Queens in Myers Park every day: that blue-and-white canopy, those three garage bays, the old analog gas pumps, and the parking lot populated by everything from BMWs to Buicks, Toyotas to Teslas.
But if all goes according to plan, Queen’s Crown Automotive — one of the only remaining full-service gas stations in the Charlotte area — will close by the end of the month after 47 years of filling the tanks of its regulars with a neighborly smile.
Dan Queen Jr., who started working the pumps for his father at age 13 and whose family owns the land the station rests on, said his family has agreed to a deal with Fifth Third Bank, which he said intends to raze the current structures and build a branch in their place. The final piece of red tape is a City Council vote next week, and council member Larken Egleston (who represents the district in which the station is located) said he is unaware of any significant opposition to the rezoning of the property.
On Wednesday, the station officially ran out of gas, a high school student he employs having milked the last drop of super unleaded out of Queen’s Crown’s tanks, and Queen plans to close up shop next week.
When he was told they’d run dry, “it hit me that I started pumping gas when Tricky Dick was president,” said Queen, now 59. “That’s Richard Nixon for folks that may be 40 years or younger and don’t know who Tricky Dick was.”
And as he talked about what it meant to be voluntarily getting out of the business his late father built, his eyes welled up with tears.
Back where it all began
When Dan Queen Sr. and his wife Elaine opened up Providence Road Shell in 1973 at 915 Providence Road, next to the True Value Hardware store in Myers Park, full-service filling stations were as ubiquitous in Charlotte as breweries are today.
“There were six full-service gas stations between this light and the light half a mile up the road,” Dan Jr. recalled on Thursday morning, as he stood outside garage bays that a Mini Cooper and a Jeep were squeezed into.
“So you really had to fight for the business. And what fighting meant was to give great service. When a car came in for gas, you had to clean all their windows, check all the tires, get ’em on the right pressure, get the fluids exactly where they needed to be, and we always carried a little Swiss broom and swept the cars out.”
He performed those tasks seven days a week as a teenager, back when Charlotte was considered a small town.
Or a small city, at least. A place where virtually all of uptown (as it was officially named by the City Council the year after Dan Sr.’s station opened) closed promptly at 5 p.m., and where the police department paid little mind to a man who took it upon himself to direct traffic in a spot where traffic did not need any direction.
“You know the guy they got immortalized down there?” Dan Jr. said, referring to the close-to-life-size statue of the man who became a familiar face in Charlotte in the ’70s by donning a bucket hat, tucking a towel under his arm, and “directing traffic” on a grassy median about 600 feet away.
“That’s Hugh McManaway. Well, I remember seeing him when he was a real person out there.”
In 1979, Queen Sr. bought the land from Shell — for “peanuts,” Dan Jr. said — and struck a deal with Texaco to become Queen’s Texaco (which remained the name for more than three decades).
Over the course of the ’80s, many full-service stations added self-service to help boost their business, since a growing number of consumers were prioritizing lower prices at the pump over the attentiveness. But Dan Sr. resisted.
“I’m not saying down the road that competition won’t drive me to add self-service,” he told the Observer in 1990, “but I’ll stay full-service-only as long as I can.”
‘This place has meant the world to me’
In 1995, Dan Jr. took over Queen’s Texaco, after his father suffered a stroke and was forced into retirement.
The younger Queen continued digging in his heels on the full-service route as the practice generally continued to decline. When the Observer did a story on full-service stations in Charlotte in 2003, it gave “a partial list” that included a dozen stations. Five years later, the newspaper revisited the topic and found just five.
Texaco would eventually wind up pulling out of North Carolina, and for more than 10 years now the station has been known as Queen’s Crown Automotive. It is one of just two full-service stations remaining in the area (the other being the Matthews Exxon at 101 W. John St., which has been open in Matthews since 1986).
And it truly has been a family affair.
Dan Jr.’s older sisters Debi McIver and Diane Queen split time working in the office for more than 20 years; after they decided to relinquish their roles this past spring, as COVID-19 became a greater risk, his daughter Sydney, 23, started helping out in the office. His wife Kathy does the books, and both of their sons — Dann, 22, and John, 20 — have worked at the station periodically. Up until the pandemic hit, even his mother Elaine came and sat in the office all day every day, “just to see the customers come in.”
Queen said none of his children was ever interested in taking over the business, though, and after years of mostly ignoring letters from people interested in the property, the family decided to strongly consider the one they received from Fifth Third in November 2018.
The rest is history.
And just to be clear: “We’re not selling the property,” Dan Jr. said, adding that the family has worked there “too long, too hard, to sell the property. We’re ground-leasing it.”
(Queen would not disclose financial details, and Fifth Third Bank declined to comment.)
He excused himself to chat with a couple of customers back to back, who both greeted him with a “Hey, Dan!” He asked one to pose for a photo. Another left the office shell-shocked upon learning the news that Queen’s Crown was closing.
This, ultimately, is the hardest part of the whole deal for Dan Jr.
“Well, for me personally it’s bittersweet,” he said.
On the one hand, “I have the freedom to do what I want to do,” said Queen, who has been on a 7:30-a.m.-to-5:30-p.m.-Monday-through-Friday schedule for 15 years and is looking forward to working “at my own pace now.” (Among other things, he’s interested in investing in more real estate — “renovating it and renting it out.”)
“But let me tell you, this place has meant the world to me. The relationships I have here, I’m not gonna get down the road. These people are great. It’s hard to talk about it without getting misty, but I love all my customers and ... I really want to take this opportunity to thank them for supporting me all these years. I love each and every one,” he said, his eyes moistening.
“I might be getting a lease payment, but I’m giving them up, and that hurts.”
This story was originally published July 16, 2020 at 3:13 PM.
