Valero Days: Remembering downtown’s nastiest gas station

If you live or work in downtown Kansas City and you have a car, and you want to fill up that car with gasoline, there aren’t many options. There’s a gas station on West Pennway just off the ramp to Interstate 35, but it’s on downtown’s western edge, plus it’s completely automated — no convenience mart, no cashiers. There’s the Grand Slam at Sixth Street and Grand, but that’s all the way to the River Market. There’s a 7-Eleven at Linwood and Gillham, but that ain’t downtown — that’s midtown, son.

For many years, the only geographically convenient option for petroleum was the Valero station at 17th Street and Grand. Poorly managed, filthy, smelly and depressing, the Valero was a necessary evil for downtown dwellers. No matter how hard you tried, sometimes there was no other option but to walk through the glass-dusted parking lot, past the vagrants and drunks hanging around outside, draw a deep breath, open the doors, and do your business. Who was above a trip to the Valero? All of us and none of us.

It closed in September. It will reopen later this month with a Phillips 66 sign out front, and the neighborhood will be the better for it. Nobody will miss the old Valero, with its fried-chicken-and-cigarettes stench and its wet trash bags hanging off chronically out-of-order pumps. The place was an abomination, utterly dysfunctional, a magnet for degenerates.

OK, maybe we’ll miss it a little bit.

The Valero was two short blocks from us here at The Pitch. We’ve got history together. Call us old-fashioned, but that counts for something in our book. In honor of the Big V’s closing, members of The Pitch staff, past and present, share with you some of our fondest memories.   

Jonathan Bender (Fat City blogger, Web editor): “It’s the only place I’ve ever seen a man try to buy a single slice of cheese from the cashier.” Was there a deli slicer running in there at the time or something? “No. He wanted one from the package of Kraft singles in the cooler. It was crazy.”

Chris Packham (former art critic): “If you were doing some kind of ingestible-toxins scavenger hunt, and your list included a bottle of 5-Hour Energy, a pack of cherry blunts, and a paper basket of fried chicken with clawed feet and beaks sticking out of it, the Valero would instantly put you up by three.” (The Valero was also home to a Chester’s fried chicken, an in-store franchise.) Packham recalls the odor: “When you opened the door, you were enveloped in a rolling fog of the fried-chicken grease you could see condensed on the windows. The air was incredibly thick in that place. You were just swimming in it. Back at the office, people would smell it in your clothes and know exactly where you’d been.”

Charles Ferruzza (food critic): “I stopped in one night, and a homeless guy had burst into the place, knocked over all the snack-cake displays on purpose, and run out. The people working were furious.” He adds, “I’d go in there once a week for lottery tickets. I like to do the Powerball with the Power Play. Power Play is a dollar extra, but you win way more. They could never figure out how to sell me a Power Play, never, not once.”

Justin Kendall (managing editor): “For a while, it was the only place in Kansas City where you could buy Faygo, which is the official soft drink of Juggalos.” (Kendall says he is not a Juggalo.)

Valero was also a vendor of hard-to-find Rap Snacks, a company that gave famous rappers their own potato-chip flavors — for example, Yung Joc Sweet n’ Hot Cheese Curls. In 2008, former Pitch blogger Owen Morris wrote a tribute to the brand based on his experiences at Valero. It’s called “A Rap to My Rap Snacks”:

So there I was talking with Dimitry at the Valero/Said I need a snack that’s tasty but not much dinero/Dimitry says, ‘Owen there’s only one way to go/And that’s with the Rap Snacks by Lil’ Romeo’.

(It goes on for about eight more bars.)

Nadia Pflaum (former staff writer): “Once, a guy at the counter gave me a pair of shamrock-shaped Kanye glasses. (It was near St. Patrick’s Day.)”

Ben Palosaari (staff writer): “Didn’t a bomb go off there a few years ago?” (Yes, in the summer of 2010, a bum loitering outside the gas station dropped an unidentified item into the clothing donation box in Valero’s parking lot, and an explosion followed shortly thereafter. Authorities were called. No one was injured.)

Peter Rugg (former staff writer) on Valero’s “No Single Beers” sign and policy: “I’ve never thought about taking one bottle of Miller High Life and trying to barter for it, but it happens so often at this gas station, they needed to write declarations,” Rugg wrote in a 2009 blog post. He asked the cashier how often customers attempt to haggle over single beers. “All the time,” she said. “They pull one beer out of a six-pack and bring it up and try to pay for it. Even with the signs up, they try to do it, and we keep telling them no.”

Berry Anderson (Filter editor): “I thought their ‘no single beer’ policy was a bunch of horseshit. Sometimes, a tallboy was all I needed for inspiration at work. I suppose the rule was in place to keep the creeps, crackheads and other assorted ne’er-do-wells from loitering in the parking lot, but really, it didn’t work. I hope the new owners are more sensitive to the needs of the working stiffs, like me, in the community.”

Your move, Phillips 66. We welcome you to the community and await your policy on tallboy cans.

Any Valero stories you’d like to share? By all means, participate in the eulogy in the comments section below.