Item seed: Phone Booths.

Blame this.

Phone Booths

On June 8, 2014, working phone booths mystically became rare enough to be worth using in magical rituals.  Why that date?  Nobody knows, actually.  Magic is not yet science; there’s a certain amount of built-in uncertainty about the whole thing. If you could reliably write it out as an equation, it’d stop being magic and start being a particularly obscure branch of physics. The later registration with the Smithsonian of a working phone booth in the National Register of Historic Places had nothing to do with this directly, although that symbolic act certainly locked down some things.

But what can you use a phone booth for, in a magical context? – The answer is not ‘communication spells.’  Not in this culture; cell phones do about 99% of what the old communication-based magics used to do, and you don’t need eye of newt or a potentially dangerous activation ritual to use one.  What they are good for is transportation; using a teleportation spell to go from one phone booth to another is much easier and cheaper (a decrease by at least a factor of 2) to accomplish.  Some researchers are currently trying to see if they can boost enough power into the metaphysical system to allow a limited form of time travel, but most mages think that the scheme is based on bogus research.  

Also: all spells designed to boost physical attributes in their targets are automatically successful if the target is standing in a phone booth.  And yes, that’s because of Superman. The iconic image of Clark Kent changing into Superman in a phone booth still has a kick to it, occultly speaking – and it will do so for as long as anybody at all ‘remembers’ Superman doing that.
Again: it’s magic, not physics or engineering.