National Register Listing

Y Service Station and Cafe

a.k.a. Kobel's

1733 Neptune Dr., Clinton, OK

When Route 66 was designated in November 1926, the roadway consisted of a patchwork of pre-existing roads in various states of improvement, mostly unpaved in Oklahoma, and the towns along the new highway anticipated significant benefits from the traffic between Chicago and Los Angeles. That traffic indeed surged dramatically in the late twenties and into the 1930s as tourists, truckers, and a powerful migration flocked to this highway that was rapidly becoming an icon of American culture. And the benefits likewise came to the towns that had wanted to be on the main route, at least for a while. When the traffic came, however, it spawned other developments that had not been anticipated. This can be seen in the case of the Y Service Station at Neptune Park in Clinton, Oklahoma.

Route 66 west of Oklahoma City was almost completely unpaved at the birth of the road. The highway from the east entered the city of Clinton and coursed through town on Choctaw until it reached Tenth Street where it turned south. This was a common pattern in two ways: it reflected the desire to have the commerce channeled through the business district where the stores were lined up awaiting the commerce of the highway, and the road frequently turned sharp corners, traversing as it often did the section lines, and thereby zigzagging or stair-stepping its way across the state. As the road went south out of Clinton, it meandered slightly through an undeveloped agricultural area, but soon made an arc at a Y in the road where the east branch was a highway that went to Cordell and the other, U.S. 66, went straight west to Foss, Canute, Elk City, and Sayre. It was about that time that Albert P. Sights acquired the land in that Y, an area that he named Neptune Park. Shortly after the designation of Route 66, Sights subdivided his land, creating the Neptune Park Subdivision, and also granted the state an easement of forty feet from the center line of the highway as it made the arc past his Neptune property. In the coming several years the town of Clinton began to move south, with gasoline stations lining parts of Tenth Street south of the business district. In 1935 Sights sold the lot at the corner of the property to D. L. Kelly and Ralph Kobel, although Kobel became the sole owner in 1937. Prior to this, Kobel had operated a service station in town at 221 E. Choctaw-right on Route 66-and he also evidently owned another station a dozen miles west on Route 66 in the town of Foss, the shell of which still stands, bearing the ghost sign "Kobel's Place." In 1937 the city of Clinton, moving its city limits southward, used a WPA project to extend the city water lines south as far as Neptune Park. The previous year, another WPA project had actually developed the opposite end of the Y on Route 66 into a municipal park-the official Neptune Park on land Sights donated to Clinton-as a convenience to townspeople and travelers alike, and the development of the Neptune Park area had begun. It appears that Kobel built his station that same year, although the documentary record is not conclusive on that point. Moreover, two photographs located in the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum in Clinton suggest that an earlier, similar, building may have existed at this location, at one time a Black Gold Oil Station and at another time a Phillips 66 Station. It is clear, at any rate, that the gas station enlarged in the 1930s and soon came to be the hub of a commercial center in the Neptune Park area. In this process, however, one of the basic trends of development along the highway became clear: business growth was especially inviting on the peripheries of towns where the property was available for large, concentrated operations where clusters of related businesses could emerge. The business districts lacked the space for expansion and thus what would be called urban sprawl in more populated areas, or suburbanization in some locations took shape as well along the highway in the heartland of the nation.

By the end of World War II, the Y Service Station appears to have flourished sufficiently that it was known for more than just the gasoline and automobile repair service it provided. The Kobel Oil Company office was located on the second floor of the Y Service Station at Neptune Park, the Y Café (variously "featuring sizzling steak" and "Best Steaks in the USA") was in the yellow pages of the telephone book, and the Neptune Courts at Neptune Park formed an open box arrangement south of the station. In fact, two other tourist courts were located on both sides of the highway north of the station and at least two other service stations operated nearby on Route 66.

The Y Service Station at Neptune Park was positioned admirably to capture some of the heavy tourist traffic of the post-World War II years, but that traffic also unleashed other forces that would be less benign. The pressure was mounted to route the traffic that had once wound its way through downtown Clinton and other towns on Route 66 to the outskirts of the cities, and to widen and straighten the highway. This was going on elsewhere in Oklahoma, but that path of the future was more the replacement of Route 66 than it was the improvement or upgrading of it. In 1953 the Turner Turnpike between Oklahoma City and Tulsa was opened, bypassing the smaller towns on Route 66 that ran beside it. In 1957 the Will Rogers Turnpike completed the divided highway between Tulsa and Missouri, and road construction was in the works for western Oklahoma too. In 1956, the alignment of Route 66 changed and no longer followed Tenth Street south in Clinton, and therefore no longer passed in front of the Y Service Station. In 1957 the Clinton telephone book listed the Y Café, and the tourist court-now in the "motel" classification still operated, but the service station appeared to have a new manager. It was still owned by Kobel, but in the coming several years the business was no longer part of the Route 66 corridor and appears to have entered a different phase of its existence. While the new Interstate 40 was being constructed, governor Raymond Gary committed to the cities along Route 66 in the western part of the state (Weatherford, Clinton, Elk City, Sayre, and Canute) that no one of the towns would be disadvantaged by the new road's bypassing one before the others. Thus Route 66 through Clinton became the business route of 1-40 before the interstate was opened and Route 66 in Clinton followed Gary Boulevard, as Choctaw was renamed, but still missed the service station and café at the Y south of town. In 1970 1-40 was opened, and it was then possible to drive completely through Oklahoma without stopping at a stop sign or pausing for gasoline at one of the roadside stations, but Route 66 had ceased to bring customers to the Y south of Clinton well before then. In 1968 Glenna Kobel sold the property to another family and by the 1970s a series of other businesses had begun in this building. In all of this, the other pattern was painfully evident. That pattern was the reverse of the boom years that came when U.S. Highway 66 brought an unprecedented volume of traffic to the towns; now, the improved road and then the interstate took that business away from the operations that had built up alongside the highway.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 2004.