On the edge of downtown Seattle, a quirky bit of history stubbornly clings to a triangular piece of land bordered by the busy thoroughfares of East Yesler Way, 12th Avenue South and Boren Avenue South.

Nowadays, the building on that triangle patch just east of Yesler Terrace houses a restaurant called the North Shore Hawaiian BBQ. Cherrelle Yu is one of the co-owners, and she says it’s a popular spot that has been in business for 11 years.

“People always travel to Hawaii for vacations, so they already know some of the Hawaiian food,” Yu said. “And also, we have island people come to visit a lot.”

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Yu says that Hawaiian-born students from nearby Seattle University are also frequent customers.

But there’s no mistaking that the building where Huli Huli Chicken and Saimin have been served for more than a decade was not born a restaurant. Where canola oil now sizzles, motor oil once drizzled, and cooking with gas has replaced pumping gas. This barbecue joint, it turns out, is a service station in disguise.

The old structure was originally built sometime around 1950 and was known for about 20 years as the Richfield Triangle Station. A man named Joe Lloyd began working there in the early 1960s. He bought the station around 1970 and renamed it Lloyd’s Rocket, after a now defunct brand of gasoline.

Joe Lloyd was something of a character, and he and the station became landmarks in the neighborhood and in Seattle’s African American community from the 1970s to the 1990s.

As the physical plant and the man aged, Lloyd apparently talked of building a new station there, or perhaps a mini-market, and of having other family members take over operation of the business.

But none of that ever came to pass, and the station closed in 1995. Joe Lloyd died in 1996 at age 80. The building and land sat vacant for a few years, and a community mural project decorated the site in 1998. Eventually, the land was sold and various attempts were made to redevelop the property and clean up the old gas tanks.

With Seattle booming the way it is, it’s almost unbelievable that the inevitable mixed-use retail and condo building hasn’t replaced the original gas station structure. And for some reason, the legend of Lloyd’s Rocket lives on more than 20 years after the business closed.

At North Shore Hawaiian BBQ, Cherrelle Yu says that customers still ask about Lloyd’s Rocket.

“People keep (saying), ‘I remember a long time ago this was a gas station,’ you know? So yeah, it’s just customers keep telling us about it,” Yu said.

Longtime residents who bought gas there still remember Lloyd’s Rocket, as do many of the thousands of people who couldn’t avoid just driving by the place every day.

Kwame Turner is in his 70s and is active with the Black Heritage Society of Washington State. He grew up near the gas station and has many fond memories of Lloyd’s Rocket and its earlier incarnations, including paying 40 cents to pump two gallons of gas. In the late 1950s, most stations wouldn’t allow teenagers to pump gas for themselves, Turner says.

Like many who remember the station, Turner has a certain amount of what can only be described as affection for the place. But he has no illusions about Lloyd’s Rocket ever being a beacon of order and cleanliness. Still, Lloyd’s Rocket was welcoming in its own way.

“Lloyd’s Rocket was a junky looking, oily gas station. It wasn’t pristine and all that,” said Turner. “But they gave you some latitude there. They weren’t really picky, so it worked out pretty well for us guys that were trying to bend the rules.”

“Bending the rules” for Turner meant getting help installing some, shall we say, unconventional tires on his 1954 Chevy.

“A friend of mine, his sister had a ’59 Cadillac,” Turner said. “So when she wore her tires out, I got all four of them, but I only would put two on the back,” of his ’54 Chevy.

Turner says the wide, worn out Cadillac tires were special because they were so bald they were like racing slicks.

“I couldn’t put the tires on myself, but I could get them in there and they would put them on, you know? Those tires would be illegal, but they would put them on for me,” Turner said.

He admits that the tires he had installed by Lloyd’s weren’t exactly the safest or most practical choice.

“I would often have flat tires,” Turner said, laughing. “They were worn out, but they looked cool.”

Turner says that The Black Heritage Society is working on a display for next year focused on local African Americans in motorsports. He reels off a list of racing luminaries, including Arnie Bell, Dickie “Smokey” Busby and Jeanne Webster, and speculates that some of them might have been Lloyd’s Rocket customers.

Retired Seattle Times reporter Peyton Whitely visited the station in 1990. He spent a long time interviewing Joe Lloyd and then wrote a lengthy feature story. Whitely, too, noticed the disheveled quality of the iconic station.

“It was a wreck,” Whitely said, again, with obvious affection. As decrepit as it eventually became, Lloyd’s Rocket, or Joe Lloyd, somehow had that effect on people.

“The thing that astonished me about Lloyd’s Rocket is that it seemed like it was so derelict, like it was pretty near collapse,” Whitely said, chuckling as he recalled the visit he made 26 years ago. “Yet when you went in there, [Joe Lloyd] was in there pumping gas and the gas pumps still worked, and he was doing oil changes, and was still in business.”

Whitely points out that the longevity of Lloyd’s Rocket was due partly to its location on the main route to Seattle from the Eastside, before the final miles of new freeway connected the original I-90 Lake Washington Floating Bridge directly to I-5 in the early 1990s.

“Thousands of people drove by that station everyday commuting from the Eastside to downtown,” Whitely said. “If you drove across I-90 and exited on Rainier Avenue South and turned toward downtown Seattle, you ended up driving up Boren,” right past Lloyd’s Rocket, Whitely noted.

Whitely says that in addition to selling gas, Joe Lloyd also sold fuel oil and delivered it to homes and businesses himself via truck.

In the 1990 Seattle Times feature, Lloyd told Whitely, “My customers have been what other companies didn’t want. The big oil companies are very choosy, if someone didn’t meet their credit ratings, they didn’t bother with him. Big companies didn’t want to fool with 50 or 100 gallons. But me, they’d call, and ask if I could make a delivery at 7 a.m., and I could do it, or on Sundays, or holidays. By doing that, what other people couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do, it made it possible to survive.”

Lloyd also talked about what originally motivated him to go into business for himself, citing a conversation he had with a Korean man when Lloyd was serving in the military overseas.

“What motivated me &#8212 when I was in Korea &#8212 a Korean told me, he opened my eyes for me. I thought things were really bad, we had to sit in the back of the bus, I was yelling about how black folks could never do anything,” Lloyd told Whitely. “He said, ‘You have come from the land of opportunity.’ And he said you have to do two things: to get knowledge, and to get money. Without them, you ain’t going to be able to do anything.'”

Whitely says that he interviewed hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of people during his decades with The Seattle Times and that he’s forgotten many of over the years. Joe Lloyd isn’t one of them.

Kwame Turner says that another unforgettable Seattle figure from that era also spent time in the neighborhood near Lloyd’s Rocket.

Jimi Hendrix, says Turner, “was sure in that neck of the woods.” Hendrix, Turner says, spent a lot of time jamming with fellow local musician Ron Holden at the Holden family home just a few blocks away from Lloyd’s Rocket. “So they’re three or four blocks away and Jimi was over at their house jamming. That puts him close to the ‘scene of the crime,'” said Turner, laughing.

In those years, however, Turner says Hendrix would’ve had no need to buy gas from Lloyd’s Rocket or anywhere.

“He would’ve gone riding in somebody else’s car,” Turner said. “God, Jimi was so poor back then.”

Over at the North Shore Hawaiian BBQ, an annoyingly sentimental reporter asked Charrelle Yu if there are any items on the menu that pay tribute to the old gas station. Maybe a “Lloyd’s Rocket BBQ DeLuxe”?

“No,” Yu said. “You know, the neighborhood change(s) a lot. Some people have their memories about [Lloyd’s Rocket], but it’s not like that many people know about it.”

Darn. There’s at least one annoyingly sentimental reporter who would’ve enjoyed eating one of those.