The Tower Station appeared as "Ramone's House of Body Art" in the Pixar movie, Cars.

Tower Station and U Drop Inn

Shamrock, Texas

Dubbed "the Taj Mahal of Texas," the Tower Station and U Drop Inn is the ancestor of the modern gas station/mini-mart. It opened for Route 66 business on April 1, 1936, and was the brainstorm of John Lawson Nunn (1902-1957). According to Mother Road lore, Nunn used an old nail to sketch his vision for the three-building complex in the dirt of a nearby motor court driveway.

Texas art deco building is a magnet for vehicles of the past.

Architect Joseph Champ Berry took Nunn's dusty dream and designed a fantasy roadside oasis out of concrete, brick, stucco, and glazed terra-cotta tiles, with two ornamental towers and plenty of neon accents. Total cost: $23,000 -- a lot of money in the mid-1930s. A historical marker out front praises the structure's "geometric detailing" and "curvilinear massing."

Beatrice Nunn, John Nunn's wife, told the Amarillo Globe News that the building complex was designed to be eye-catching so that it would offer a "big Texas welcome" to visitors arriving from across the Oklahoma state line. In the early years, she said, the glow of its neon could be seen from over 20 miles away across the treeless Texas panhandle.

Tower Station and U Drop Inn look much the same today as they did in this 1948 photo.

The name "U Drop Inn" was the winning entry in a contest, submitted by a ten-year-old Shamrock schoolboy. Although the cafe was never an "Inn" because there was never any place to sleep, the name was so catchy that no one seemed to mind. When it opened it was the only restaurant within 100 miles, and advertised itself as "the swankiest of the swank eating places."

Snow globe Station has oversize architectural add-ons.

With the completion of Interstate 40 and the bypassing of Route 66, the Tower Station and U Drop Inn gradually lost its dazzle. The cream-colored walls became covered with grime, the neon tubes shattered and were removed. The buildings were repossessed by a bank, and in 1997 the abandoned complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places. This kickstarted its $1.7 million restoration, which was completed in July 2003 (Since no nighttime color photos existed from the 1930s, the conservators had to guess at the colors of the neon).

Hollywood noticed the once-again-stylish Tower Station and U Drop Inn, and reworked it as "Ramone's House of Body Art" in the 2006 Pixar movie, Cars. Shamrock boasts that the buildings are among the most photographed sights along Route 66, especially at dusk with the neon (now updated to LED tubing) aglow.

Despite the presence of vintage fuel pumps, modern visitors cannot buy gas at the Tower Station, although it's equipped with several electric vehicle chargers. The U Drop Inn, which had closed in 1995, lay dormant for over a quarter-century before it began serving food again in 2021.