PUMP CLOSED.(closure of many Gaseteria gasoline stations in New York, New York)

As demolition begins this spring on the Gaseteria filling station at the corner of Lafayette and Houston streets, the presence of a conspicuous New York brand will be diminished. This scruffy property, along with twenty-four other Gaseterias in the city, will be leased to British Petroleum and become a B.P. Connect Station, complete with cappuccino machines, solar-powered canopies, and automated pumps with Internet access. An ecologically suggestive green-and-yellow motif will replace the simple, begrimed emblem of a royal-blue semicircle and a red semicircle embracing the word "Gaseteria,"in bold black type.

"To me, it looked like a hamburger in the beginning,"Oscar Porcelli, Gaseteria's founder, said of the logo, which he designed himself. "The colors were the American flag--red, blue, and white."Porcelli is sixty-seven and small in stature, with an ebbing white hairline. He keeps his office at the company's vast terminal in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where there is a lot full of retired Gaseteria signs and a valve attached to the Buckeye Line, a pipeline that brings gasoline to New York from Linden, New Jersey. The gas flows into aboveground tanks, which, altogether, hold about three million gallons. When Porcelli came to the United States from Argentina, in 1957, he worked in construction, bought storefronts, dry cleaners, and a dance club, and eventually started building gas stations. He came up with the idea for Gaseteria in 1976. "those were the crazy days of disco and name-using. There was Danceteria, Caviarteria--lot of the -terias were going on. So I did Gaseteria. It was catchy."The company, which initially distributed gas for the majors, like Amoco and Mobil, went independent in 1980. Because of its low prices, it attracted cabbies, and was, at its peak, the largest independent in the metropolitan area. Today, it owns almost thirty acres of land in the five boroughs.