An eyesore on North Main Street that also was a flop house for the homeless was torn down Thursday.
Crews leveled the barn that once housed an auto body and paint shop between the Manteca Moose Lodge and the Robert E. Goodwin Community One School on North Union Road at Lancaster Drive.
In its place Manteca’s sixth Chevron gas station and Food Mart will be built on the 0.93-acre parcel.
It will consist of 12 gas pumps under a canopy and a 3,700-square-foot building that includes the convenience store and a suite of 1,728 square feet to be rented for retail purposes. The project also includes a second building proposed for 5,858 square feet of retail space in four suites.
It is the first new station on North Main Street in nearly 20 years. Over the past 10 years two stations were removed along the corridor. They were the Shell station at Louise and Main that was replaced with a CVS Drug Store and a Beacon station at Alameda and Main that was razed. At one point there were plans by a bank to locate a branch on the former Beacon site.
Manteca already has five Chevron stations. They are on West Yosemite west of Union Road, Union Road at Louise avenue, Louise Avenue at Cottage Avenue, South Main Street at Mission Ridge Drive, and East Yosemite Avenue east of Spreckels Avenue.

So who neutered
the church on
Manteca’s city seal?
A couple that recently moved to Manteca from San Leandro asked what the big building on the City of Manteca’s seal represents.
The short answer: It’s a neutered church.
When the red, white, and, blue seal was adopted in the 1970s, a cross was prominently displayed on the a modern-looking church’s roof line. The second structure is a house with several trees behind it.
The logo also contains Manteca’s municipal motto, “The Family City.”
Sometime during the 1990s someone took it upon themselves to make the cross disappear apparently so not to make the city a target for those who claim such a symbol violates the politically correct doctrine defining what the constitution means by the separation of state and church.
No official action to do away with the cross was ever taken.
It’s kind of ironic given the fact the Manteca City Council found a way to continue opening council meetings with an invocation that wouldn’t violate the letter and spirit of legal rulings regarding the separation of church and state but they let the cross on the city seal go.
The revisionist history so far has excluded city seals in the Manteca Historical Society collection.
To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com