These are two stores not far from my home, and only about a three-minute drive from each other.

For many years, the first one was a Hollywood Video and the second one was a Blockbuster. The first one recently became a pet store, which moved from the second one, downsizing and changing shopping centers due to high rents. The first one was also a pet store—Unleashed by Petco, a small-format version of the chain—for a short period in the middle of a long vacancy.

A couple of years ago I was exploring the historic imagery on Google Street View somewhere in Arlington, Virginia, and I came across an intersection with two video rental stores: a Blockbuster on one corner and a Hollywood Video on another.

The Blockbuster is now…an Unleashed by Petco! The Hollywood Video is a Mattress Firm, with the tower over the entrance still intact:

This was in the late 2000s; it wasn’t very long ago that these stores were everywhere, the way a Shell and an Exxon will occupy different corners of an intersection, or the way Burger King and McDonald’s will be next to each other. They disappeared more rapidly than any other retail segment or consumer service I can think of. (Even a few no-name tube televisions kept getting made for a few years after the market had almost entirely shifted to flatscreens.)

I observed something similar about all-you-eat buffets, recently. When I was a kid it felt like almost every large shopping center had a one, usually either Old Country or a Chinese buffet. “It can be sad and unsettling,” I wrote, “to watch something that was only recently banal and ordinary inexorably slip away into history.”

How does the disappearance of something that was once mundane and ubiquitous change actual, physical urban space? I guess it depends a lot on what that vanished use physically requires. Factories, obviously, are tougher reuse cases than vacant stores.

Maybe this is one good thing about strip malls: by standardizing retail (and restaurant) architecture, they make reuse of space easier—though, of course, at the cost of that architecture being distinctive or interesting. Standard, boring, simple buildings can diminish the public realm, but they can also lower the cost of doing business, which is good for economic vitality and small-scale enterprise. And those are things can which enhance the public realm. Can you do both? It’s an interesting question.

And before I leave you, here’s an interesting article at Places Journal that goes a lot deeper into some of this!

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