Hat & Boots Park

This guide to Hat & Boots Park in Seattle traces commercial artist Lewis Naysmith's 1954 pitch to build a gas station shaped like a giant cowboy hat and matching boots along old Highway 99, with architect Albert Poe drawing up the official permits. It follows the Premium Tex station through thirty-four years of business, billed as home to the largest hat and boots in America, until the interstate drained its highway traffic in 1988 and the pumps went dry for good. Fifteen years of peeling paint and climbing weeds followed, a landmark slowly turning into a ruin nobody had agreed to save.