I think ruins have always appealed to people; at least, it’s certainly been a romantic theme for a few centuries, like in Shelley’s Ozymandias, or Gandy’s drawings imagining the Bank of England as a ruin.
The normal way you encounter something like a McDonalds, it’s 50% perfornance, with all the lights and the cleaning and the regular redecoration and what not, so seeing it abandoned is like peeking outside the flow of normal reality. There’s obviously the melancholic side to something being abandoned, as well, but you get a similar effect with places that are brand new before they’re occupied.
