Illustration by Britt Spencer
Yes, it’s verifiably the world’s largest. And it sat atop an actual Amoco till 1998, when British Petroleum bought the company. But there’s been a big sign—and a gas station—there since 1922, “which predates the federal highway system,” says historian Joe Sonderman, author of Route 66 Missouri. In 1921, planner Harland Bartholomew urged the city to purchase the odd little triangle of land, then known as the Clayton Cutoff. When the city failed to do so, a Standard Oil station soon went up, topped with a 65-by-85-foot sign attached to concrete piers sunk 8 feet in the ground. At the time, it was one of the three largest signs in the country (along with a chewing gum sign in Times Square), and it might’ve been one of the first double-sided signs in the U.S. It cost $50,000; glittered with 5,260 bulbs; and flashed advertising slogans in red, white, and blue. The ruse worked: It sold more gas than any other Standard station in the Midwest.
It was torn down in 1931 and replaced with a cream-colored, enamel brick building roofed with Spanish terracotta tiles. The sign, believe it or not, grew even more ostentatious. Still double-faced, it was now 60 feet high, 45 feet long, and studded with 5,800 lightbulbs. It also sported 2,900 feet of neon tubing and 5 miles of wiring, and it required its own electrical substation, which not only kept the sign humming but powered 20-foot-high light standards and a thousand floodlights. “Pilots flying into Lambert Field could use it as an approach beacon,” Sonderman says.
LeClare C. “Steve” Stevenson took over the site in 1951, and in 1959 replaced the building with the split-level, stone-faced Midcentury station that we know and love today. He also swapped out that crazy sign, replacing it with a sleeker, more space-age, plastic-faced sign, which would not, for the record, read “Amoco” till 1985. Meaning it’d been just a decade and change when we petitioned BP to leave it alone, proving that our attachment to it is perhaps more emotional than historical—or maybe it would just feel weird not to have a gigantic sign there after all these years.
“It’s such a landmark that when KTVI Channel 2 began using a camera shot looking east from the top of St. Mary’s Hospital in 2015, sharp-eyed viewers wondered why the Amoco sign was blotted out,” Sondeman says. “It turned out that the state had put the camera up to monitor air quality and apparently decided to put an opaque box over the sign in the feed.” Once it was pointed out, the state removed the box, perhaps because they knew better than to mess with people who successfully forced a multinational petrochemical company to retain a huge, defunct sign above one of its most visible gas stations.
Editor's Note: This article has been updated with the correct spelling of Stevenson's surname.
