Our single screens deserve a second act

When a single-screen shuts, the obituary always gets the loss wrong. We mourn the building — the neon, the balcony, the painted ceiling — and miss the institution: the one room in the city where a ticket bought the same experience regardless of what you drove there.

The multiplex is not the villain; arithmetic is. Land under a thousand seats outvalues the seats. But cities routinely overrule arithmetic for things they value — parks, heritage facades, parade grounds — and the case for the halls is at least as strong: they are infrastructure for a shared public life we claim to miss.

The working models exist and are not charity. Halls that split the floor into two screens and kept the balcony original. Morning classics programming that outsells premieres. Community trusts running matinees for schools. Every one began with a municipality deciding the hall was worth a conversation.

A city that has watched itself on one big screen for sixty years should not let the lights go out for want of imagination. Heritage is not only what we build. It is where we sat together.