About Hat ‘n’ Boots
Oxbow Park in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood contains the remains of a gas station that once looked like somebody had emptied a giant cowboy’s closet beside the road. Hat ‘n’ Boots consists of a cowboy hat roughly 44 feet wide and a pair of boots about 22 feet tall.
Artist Lewis Nasmyth designed the Western-themed service station in 1953, and it opened the following year. The hat served as the main gas-station building while the boots incorporated restrooms. Seattle Parks says the novelty worked so well that the station was, for a time, the state’s biggest-selling service station.
Interstate 5 eventually diverted traffic away from the business, and the station declined. Local residents rallied to preserve the giant structures rather than let them disappear. The pieces were moved to Oxbow Park in 2003 and restored.
The fuel pumps are gone, but the architecture remains wonderfully literal. Instead of placing a cowboy sign on a normal building, the designers made the building itself into a cowboy hat and provided matching boots big enough to function as rooms.