In the old days: the building blocks of commercial districts

Thriving neighborhood commercial districts had a grocery store, post office, pharmacy with a soda fountain, and the movie theater. A five and dime, either independent or a chain (Kresge, Kress, Woolworths, McCrory, Green, TC&Y) rounded things out.

The building blocks for downtown commercial districts were department stores, movie theaters, and sit down restaurants.

Small towns combined the two, with locally owned department stores that were much smaller than the stores in the big cities.

Neighborhood theaters didn't really start until the late 1920s, only to peak around 1950. People used to see movies a few times each week until the 1950s, when suburbanization took root, and family sizes increased, and of course, television.

The movie industry made its money downtown, and had a complicated system of clearances (second, third, and fourth run theaters) guiding how much and where movies were shown.

When antitrust laws forced movie production houses to sell off their theaters, cross-subsidization was no longer possible. Downtown theaters couldn't make it in the face of higher expenses and the smaller sized audiences that resulted due to suburbanization and the construction of cinemas in the suburbs.

Of course, the same kind of scaling up that I described with supermarkets also happened with movie theaters as they went from one to two or three screens (one projectionist, one manager, one set of ushers and a concession stand) to multiplexes.

So the number of theaters has multiplied while at the same time the number of movies people see in an average year has declined precipitously. No wonder most of the companies have been through at least one bankruptcy.

Index Keywords: retail