Vero Beach’s iconic Steil gas station on U.S. 1 – a local landmark for more than five decades – is scheduled to close Saturday, unable to compete with the upgraded products, services and ambiance at nearby Wawa, Cumberland Farms and Speedway stores.
The property will be sold next week, but it will not remain a gas station, according to Cecilia Simons, daughter of Jim Steil, who founded the independent Steil Oil Company in 1965 with the gas station on U.S. 1 and saw it expand to 16 Florida locations.
Steil, a Miami native who served in the Army during World War II and moved to Vero Beach in 1954, died in 2019. The station on U.S. 1 is the company’s lone surviving station.
“We’re a small, family business, and we’re like all the other small, locally owned businesses that are getting pushed out by big corporations,” said Simons, who co-owns the company with her brother and sister.
“We were doing well enough to keep everyone employed, and we wanted to keep going, if only for sentimental reasons,” she added. “We developed a lot of loyal customers over 56 years, going back to when the area code here was 305, and the station still reminds them of old Vero.
“But we’re competing against three majors, all within a mile of us, and that competition just kept making it harder.”
Simons said the family decided “within the last couple of months” to shutter the station and sell the property, which is under contract. She declined to identify the buyer, the buyer’s plans or the sale price.
She said the decision was “very, very difficult for us,” but she believes her father –who worked as a real estate agent for the General Development Corporation in the Vero Highlands and Vero Shores before starting his business – would have agreed with it.
“My father created a successful business, and that first station on U.S. 1 has been a great one for a long time,” Simons said, adding that she became involved with the company’s operations 33 years ago. “But he knew what the competition was doing to us.”
The original Steil gas station flourished through the 1970s and into the 1980s, when the stretch of I-95 linking Vero Beach and Fort Pierce was unfinished and thru traffic on U.S. 1 was heavier.
Southbound traffic was diverted eastbound onto State Road 60 to U.S. 1, through Vero Beach, then south to the turnpike feeder road, which took drivers back to I-95 near Fort Pierce.
“You had to get off at Vero Beach and go to U.S. 1, so a lot of the big trucks would stop for gas on their way through,” Simons said. “They liked us because our prices have always been very competitive. They still are.”
Competitive pricing hasn’t been the only draw for local motorists, however. The Steil station was one of the last at which an attendant would still pump your gas.
Simons said she’s concerned about Steil’s older customers, especially those who might struggle physically to handle self-service pumps.
“They depend on us to pump their gas, but I don’t know where to send them,” she said. “It’s sad.”
Simons said she has had a particularly tough time breaking the news to longtime customers, many of whom have accounts with the company.
“I had tears in my eyes when I talked to them on the phone,” she said. “I keep remembering pictures of my dad pumping gas or holding a hose, watering the grass. There are so many memories of that station.”
If all goes as planned, Simons said, the station’s underground gas tanks will be removed early next week, and the sale of the property will close next Friday.
And just like that, another nostalgic connection to Vero Beach’s past will disappear.
“This was our first station, and now it’s our last,” she said. “It’s been quite a ride.”
