On the obsolescence of movie palaces: the movie palaces were built in the heyday of the studio system, when the studios dictated what the moviegoing public could see. Fewer movies played for shorter runs to larger audiences. The shift from mass production to mass customization, from public to private cultural consumption, toward more flexibility in scheduling, and away from mass society in general has undermined this model, resulting in more movies playing to smaller audiences, and more movies watched outside of theaters (i.e., video, TV). Similarly, the market for concerts and live theater performances has been fragmented such that few performances can fill more than a thousand seats. One hope for old theaters may be that even a niche market, given today’s larger population, could fill a venue designed for a mass market: foreign films, punk rock, acts in Spanish or Hindi.

On the obsolescence of good corner buildings: many early zoning ordinances, most famously those in Paris and New York, used “sky planes” to determine the size and shape of a building. Under these ordinances, a building’s size was related to the length of its street frontage and the width of the street it faced. Hence, a building on a wide street could be taller, and a building on a corner — with more frontage — could be larger and could come up to the sidewalk on both streets. The heightened visual prominence of a corner lot also commanded higher land prices; developers made these buildings particularly imposing to attract foot traffic. Today, auto dependence has raised demand for parking lots, reduced demand for floor space (especially in narrow configurations), and functionally reduced the visual prominence of the corner.