The Paramount Theatre

The Paramount opened in 1920 at 215 Third Street as Baton Rouge's movie palace — fourteen hundred seats, the kind of room a small city built when it wanted to prove it was a city. For most of the century it was where downtown went on a Friday night.

It was demolished in 1979 to build a parking lot. That is the whole arc: a fourteen-hundred-seat picture palace, and then somewhere to leave a car. Downtown Baton Rouge lost a row of buildings in those decades; the Paramount is the one preservationists still bring up first, because the trade was so plainly bad and nobody could stop it.