The Red House

This guide to the Red House in Taipei traces the decline of an octagonal 1908 market hall turned cinema, its shadowy seats acquiring an off-screen reputation that helped sink it by the late 1990s. You'll hear about the theater's closure in 1998, a fire that gutted the plaza behind it two years later, and the years the block sat boarded up afterward. Small businesses crept back in around 2006, drawn by cheap rent and a new subway stop nearby.