The newly elected City Board of Order’s first order of business, and by unanimous vote to boot, was passing a groundbreaking measure to remodernize and remodel our modern model city.

Residents’ sentiments about the North Zembla (NoZa) district drove the demand for a total and exhaustive creative deconstruction program to clean up the blighted buildings in this up-and-coming neighborhood. The program is further supported by a promise of neighborhood rejuvenation via the Board’s vocal agreement that untapped potential does exist for multifaceted mixed-use commercial and residential development as part of a Riverwalk Development Plan along the freshly EPA-certified ecologically sound Nouvelle Vire River.

Clearly, any rational citizen who knows about the initiative is asking: What took so long?

Well. Let me first say that it’s as swell a question to ask as any. In fact, it’s such a swell question to ask that I took it upon myself to stroll through NoZa, my old stomping ground turned ground zero for creative deconstruction, so I could ask folks on the street that very same, very swell question.

Deconstruction was already afoot. There was the industrious whirring of motors boosting productivity. The lucrative sledgehammering of services being rendered. The bullish bulldozing of tumbling buildings creating value. All of it harmonizing in a cost-effective, well-procured, and smartly managed concert of progress.

Sure. The NoZa neighborhood is a historical hotbed of architecture and socioeconomic studies. It’s been featured as the setting for numerous movies and great works of literature.

The post-war boom unleashed invisible forces of speed and energy across the country, and the Federal Interstate Highway Program drove those forces into Orange Forest in the late 50s. Along with these invisible forces of speed and energy, the Interstate brought a barrage of motor-focused businesses to Pewter Avenue, running alongside it. Drive-ins, gas stations, fast-forcemeat joints, coffee shops, and more. And, with plenty of open tracts to work with after the 1949 North Zembla Fire, the architects traded their Stetsons for Jetsons and started designing building decorations and signage that reflected the latest space-age and atomic technology. It was all to allure to consumers, but the unique designs with built-in promises also attracted Hollywood bedazzlers, anti-literary literati, beatnik influencers, trendsetting biker gangs, and more.

Sure. We’ll miss the original iconic Jolly Coffee Shop, a neighborhood staple since the mid-50s. A spot that also holds sentimental value for me since Embers first took me there after the Orator took a chance on this gristled novice back in ‘91. I’ll never forget that first Jolly visit with Embers. She was just being a helluva colleague and welcoming a greenie to the team. Sharing some of her vast tribal knowledge, so to speak. But it became a little ritual for us. We’d go drink black coffee bops, eat glazed doughnut slop, and talk nonstop shop in that doo-wop backdrop. I have to credit our Jolly ritual as one of the key factors in contributing to the journalist I’ve grown to become today. For better or worse.

And of course. Who won’t shed a tear at the loss of the Silly Piggy Supper Club? It does, after all, have a strong claim as the “Birthplace of Novelty Halloween Songs” since Phreddy Phrankenstein and the Phony Baloneys first performed “Dracula’s Groovin’ Uvula” at the Grande Armée of Fraternal Forester Executives’ third annual Halloween costume party in 1951.