SAMMIE ABBOTT
Posted on 09/26/2019 4:27:20 PM PDT by cba123
The first gas station in the U.S. that has been completely transitioned from a petroleum station to exclusively charging EVs opened Thursday in Takoma Park, Maryland.
RS Automotives, the local gas station, has been around since 1958.
Depeswar Doley, owner of the station since 1997, said he was already unhappy with the way oil and gasoline companies structure contracts — such as limiting the use of multiple suppliers, including clauses that extend contracts when a certain volume of sales is not met and limiting maintenance support. These business factors already were pushing him to consider other options.
A nudge from his daughter was the final step in convincing Doley to make the switch to EV charging.
(please see link for full article)
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
well that and $800,000 in free taxpayer money:
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I’m going to make an assumption that a gas station in operation since the 1950’s has at least some tank leakage and that selling the land would unleash the EPA on them with a vengeance.... This option likely keeps those tanks in the ground (unused) and prevents the discovery of the (likely) leakage...
I’m not against electric vehicles per se but they have serious limitations. If you really want electric vehicles to be viable, you need to be able to generate more electricity and beef up the power grid. Then you will need a quantum leap in battery technology.
I think the former can be partially solved using molten salt thorium reactors to produce all the power we need very safely. The power grid improvements will take time. The battery technology will come but it will take years if not decades.
Yeah. Very liberal - even by Maryland standards.
IIRC, Tacoma Park has, among other things, banned the possession or use of nuclear weapons anywhere within city limits.
Meanwhile in August of 2021...
The first gas station in the U.S. that has been completely transitioned from a petroleum station to exclusively charging EVs has closed due to lack of business.
RS Automotives, the local gas station, has been around since 1958 and the change in 2019 was welcomed, but sadly running a convince store coupled with the charge for electricity was not viable.
Depeswar Doley, owner of the station since 1997, said he thought switching to electric charging was a win-win. “But I was a fool and I blame Greta and my daughter who nudged me to make the switch to EV charging.”
17 year old daughter talked him into it!
He had to give a 1/3 of that to bidens niece.
Wawa has charging stations at some stores here. Good luck, Mr. Foley...
“I’m going to make an assumption that a gas station in operation since the 1950’s has at least some tank leakage and that selling the land would unleash the EPA on them with a vengeance.... This option likely keeps those tanks in the ground (unused) and prevents the discovery of the (likely) leakage...”
i was thinking the same thing, and it’s almost a guarantee that you’re 100% correct ...
Is there some kind of local need for this? Most people with Teslas know they’re within range to charge at home, then make it to work and back. Does he really expect people to stop at his place for a while to recharge? Where is his expected customer base already getting their recharge from? Why would they switch to him?
Most recharge stations that are out there, are businesses with free chargers in the parking lot, or have the chargers as an auxiliary to their main business. Going all-in on this sounds like a pretty dumb idea.
Sammie Abbott (born April 25, 1908) was an American politician who served as the 18th mayor of Takoma Park, Maryland, from 1980 to 1985.
Abbott enrolled in Cornell University to study architecture but dropped out a few credits short of his degree to organize farmers and the unemployed in Buffalo, New York and Niagara, New York during the Great Depression.
In 1938, he met his wife, Ruth, in a Buffalo jail when she came to visit her father, a bricklayer and union activist, who had been arrested with Abbott.Together, they moved to Washington, D.C. in 1940, and Abbott and his father-in-law built a house in Takoma Park.
In the 1950s he actively campaigned for the adoption of the Bertrand Russell peace petition.
He described himself as a Marxist, and in 1954, he was accused of being a member of the Communist party and called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. After his testimony, he was fired from his job as a commercial artist, turning to freelance work.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Abbott was one of the leaders of the Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis (ECTC), organizing the opposition to the construction of the North Central Freeway through Northeast Washington and Takoma Park, using the slogan, “No white men’s roads through black men’s homes.”
Abbott ran for mayor of Takoma Park in 1978, but lost by just 8 votes. He won the office in 1980, and was re-elected in 1982 and 1984. As mayor, he oversaw the institution of rent control, installed speed bumps and four-way stops to slow traffic
During his tenure, Takoma Park declared itself a Nuclear-free zone and a sanctuary for Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees. Abbott declared Takoma Park “Tree City, USA,” and the city, which had been known as “Tacky Park,” acquired the nickname of the “People’s Republic of Takoma.”
In his bid for a fourth term in 1985, Abbott lost by just seven votes.
Abbott died on December 15, 1990. The Takoma Park City Council passed a resolution lowering the city flag to half-mast, and the Montgomery County Council declared January 5, 1991, Sammie Abbott Day. Hundreds attended a memorial service that was held at the Washington Ethical Society.
In 2002, Abbott was inducted into the Montgomery County Human Rights Hall of Fame. In 2015, a plaque was dedicated for Abbott in the Citizens’ Center. The plaque recognizes Abbott’s contributions to Takoma Park and concludes with a quote from him: “If we can’t make it happen in Takoma Park, there’s no hope for the nation.”<
SAMMIE ABBOTT
How Takoma Park Became ‘The Berkeley Of The East’
https://wamu.org/story/19/04/24/how-takoma-park-became-the-berkeley-of-the-east/
Exploring the origins of a Washington suburb’s hippy-dippy reputation.
PART OF WHAT’S WITH WASHINGTON
Mikaela Lefrak
Takoma Park, Maryland, is a small suburb with a big reputation. It has an official ban on nuclear weapons, a peace delegate, an annual folk festival, a local voting age of 16 and a giant crocheted octopus that lives on its clock tower. Many people in the Washington region refer to it as “The People’s Democratic Republic of Takoma Park” or “Granola Park” instead. An Urban Dictionary contributor calls it “the capital of hippie-land.”
The city’s reputation is so pervasive that it prompted Will Kastens of Adelphi, Maryland, to submit a question to WAMU’s What’s With Washington about its origins. “How did Takoma Park become the Berkeley of the East?” he asked.
The answer dates back more than 100 years. But before we go there, let’s clear up one thing first.
Which Takoma Are We Talking About, Exactly?
The Washington region is home to two places with similar names: Takoma Park, Maryland, and Takoma, D.C. They share a Metro station, a lot of history and a reputation for progressive activism.
Takoma and Takoma Park were founded as one by the developer Benjamin Franklin Gilbert in the early 1880s. He liked the land’s position along the B&O railroad (easy commuting!), its elevation and forests (not a swamp!), and the fresh water supply from Sligo Creek (again, not a swamp!). He took its name from the Native American word “tacoma,” which is thought to mean “high up” or “near heaven.”
Takoma Park, Maryland, was incorporated in 1890. It straddled Prince George’s and Montgomery counties for most of the 20th century. The county lines were finally adjusted in 1997 to place the city entirely in Montgomery County. That helped clear up some confusion, but Takoma/Takoma Park’s nomenclature still befuddles many a longtime area resident today.
Teetotalers Get The Ball Rolling
My first stop is a house on Holly Avenue. The street is classic Takoma Park: Gray-haired neighbors wave hello and adjust their lawn signs for progressive causes. Many of their big-but-not-too-big houses are painted bright colors and surrounded by white picket fences.
I head into the house of U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat whose district includes Takoma Park. He remembers the neighborhood as having multiple reputations when he moved in with his wife in 1990. “Part of it was the hip, funky, progressive counterculture mecca. It was also known as a place that was more affordable, more working class and more gritty.”
Raskin dates Takoma Park’s liberal reputation all the way back to 1903. That’s when the Seventh Day Adventist Church relocated its world headquarters to Takoma Park — HQ2, if you will. The Adventists liked that they could have a D.C. address while still benefiting from the area’s open space, natural beauty and a ban on alcohol (the founder and mayor, Gilbert, was a teetotaler).
“The Seventh Day Adventists were do-gooders,” Raskin said. They founded institutions like a university, hospital, publishing house and sanitarium that helped make the commuter suburb an attractive place to live.
Community-focused organizations continued to crop up over the next couple of decades. The town won a bid for a Carnegie library, founded a Fourth of July parade and welcomed a new Boy Scout troops and many new churches. For years, it remained a successful but quiet suburb.
Then Sammie Abbott showed up.
A ‘Perpetually Mad’ New Yorker Brings Activist Fervor To Takoma Park
To get the story of Sammie Abbott, I head to the house of Takoma, D.C., resident Loretta Neumann. She’s lived in the neighborhood since the 1970s, as have the two other women she’s invited to join us: Historic Takoma president Diana Kohn and historic preservationist Sara Green. Neumann is a co-founder of Neighbors, Inc., a group founded to end blockbusting and redlining.
“Sammie Abbott!” Neumann exclaims. Says Kohn: “He made a huge fuss. Everyone knew who Sammie Abbott was.”
Abbott was a labor organizer and graphic designer who moved to Takoma Park from New York in 1943. He once described himself to the Washington Post as “a perpetually mad person” and “too mad to sleep.”
All that anger came to good use in the mid-1960s, when Abbott led a fight against a proposal to connect the new Beltway to downtown D.C. by building another freeway. The road would have cut through Takoma and displaced hundreds of families.
Abbott rallied black and white families in both Maryland and D.C. to join a years-long battle against the freeway. He won and even got the state to invest in a Metro station for Takoma Park instead.
“Everyone got activated after that,” says Kohn. “Sometimes you were fighting two battles at the same time, and Takoma pretty much won all of them.”
Abbott went on to become mayor from 1980-85. During his tenure, Takoma Park voted to become a nuclear-free zone. For the record, it did it three years before Berkeley, California.
Can An Expensive Suburb Still Be A Hotspot For Activism?
Longtime residents like Green say they’re still keeping the activist tradition alive in Takoma Park and Takoma.
“That reputation of feistiness, it suits this community very well,” she says. “We get up in front of the City Council on things that affect the whole city, am I right?” Neumann and Kohn nod vigorously.
But Takoma Park has become such an attractive place to live that the area’s once-midrange Victorians and bungalows now easily sell for more than $1 million. “It’s very competitive right now,” says Long & Foster real estate agent Elliot Barber. “There’s a definite strong upward trend (in home prices) that even five years ago I didn’t see coming.”
Housing prices and the average age of residents have both gone up since its activism heyday. It might be tough for a young Jamie Raskin or Loretta Neumann to move there now.
But if you’re looking for a reliably funky July 4th parade or a history lesson on 1960s activism, Takoma Park is still the place to go.
“A nudge from his daughter was the final step in convincing Doley to make the switch to EV charging.”
Serves him right for sending her off to college.
This would be primarily for EV's other than Tesla. Tesla's would be able to use the station with a $450 CHAdeMO adapter. This would likely be a last resort for Tesla owners.
As you point out fast charging, is a last resort. Most people charge at work or home. It would seem to me generating foot traffic for the convenience store would be a problem.
I know what you mean. I was stationed at Fort Bliss, and made the trip to Tucson and Ft. Huachuca several times (a college classmate was MI, I was ADA). Made many long trips on I-10 to San Antonio and Houston. Long stretches of nothing, to say the least.
Maybe he should set up a massage parlor on site. That might attract some guys.
So how long does it take to charge up a car?
This idea might work for Walmart or other retail outfits. You pull up out front. Valet service takes your car to the charging station. You shop. The valet service is notified when you checkout. When you walk out of the store, your car is ready to go.
[If it’s near I-95 it just *might* pay off.Otherwise...stupid move.]
Takoma Park is not near I-95, TP is a lefty/sanctuary town.
I give it six months.
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