Stephen King’s monumental fantasy epic, The Dark Tower, takes place in a world very much like our own, a parallel Earth that shares many attributes with ours, except that this other world is dying at some fundamental, metaphysical level. Entropy is accelerating; time no longer flows at a steady rate; most machines have ceased to function. Societies are failing and human behavior is changing for the worse, becoming barbaric and even monstrous. Even geography has been altered, with distances between places increasing, or their locations actually shifting around. Some of the inhabitants of this alternate Earth — the ones who are still rational, anyway — speak wistfully of what things were like “before the world moved on.”

I think that’s a wonderful phrase, evocative of so many things: loss, alienation, resignation, the sense of big changes occurring in spite of an individual’s actions or feelings. Perhaps most of all, it speaks of the melancholy recognition that something important has slipped away from you while you weren’t paying attention. My friend Jack uses the phrase all the time; it was very much on my mind yesterday.

It first occurred to me as I was driving to the train station for my morning ride into work, when I saw that an old house at the corner of 114th South and Redwood — that’s only a couple miles from my home, for the record — has been demolished to make way for a road-expansion project. Now, to be fair, the old place was a wreck beyond any hope of restoration. I don’t recall anyone ever living there, and I’ve watched it grow steadily more dilapidated with each passing year since the first time I ventured in that direction on my old banana-seat Schwinn. For at least the past decade, the house has been more-or-less invisible behind a screen of overgrown shrubs and trees, and the small segment of roof that you could see through the thicket had holes in it. But when you pass by something every day for years, it becomes a landmark, a part of the fabric from which your personal world is assembled. And to one morning discover that it has simply ceased to exist, that a street corner that has always been shady and cool and pleasantly mysterious is now suddenly barren, open to the sky, oddly naked-looking… well, it’s wrenching. And it’s made worse by the cumulative effect, by knowing that this is just one more thing you grew up with that’s now gone.

I don’t have many of my original landmarks left out here on the south end of the valley. The entire landscape — an ecology, an economy, an aesthetic, a way of life, if you want the somewhat hackneyed yet all-inclusive term — as I once knew it, as I discovered it when I was discovering my world, has been wiped away, and in a fairly short time, too. The big changes started only about 20 years ago, when I was in college. I know I blather on a lot about this subject, and perhaps it’s difficult to understand for someone who lives in a more stable area — a place that was already “tamed” before they came along, perhaps — but for me, for a lot of people who remember this valley as a very different place, it’s been downright traumatic. And the worst part is, we didn’t see it coming, and by the time we realized what was happening, it was too late to do anything about it. There wasn’t anything to be done anyhow, probably. “The world moved on” also carries an air of inevitability, doesn’t it?

These things were all still very much on my mind when I arrived at the office, where the second blow of yesterday’s one-two punch landed: I learned from a coworker that one of my favorite hole-in-the-wall lunch spots, Musumeci’s Italian Deli, is closing up for good at the end of today, after 14 years and 10 months of great food and New York-style attitude. The culprit isn’t a decline in business — which, as far as I know, has always been strong, despite a half-dozen new competitors coming into the area in recent years — but rather the usual villain of these pieces, the developers. Specifically, Salt Lake’s Redevelopment Agency (RDA), which has been wanting to demolish the shabby old building that contains Musumeci’s, as well as a divey, pay-by-the-week hotel next door, for some time.

As with that house on 114th, it’s hard to argue with the logic of demolition. Musumeci’s is — soon to be was, I suppose — located deep inside a rotting, funky-smelling, roach-infested commercial structure that probably dates to the 1940s, or maybe even earlier. To reach the deli, you had to walk down a sort of interior arcade lined with glass-fronted office or shop space, all of which has been deserted for years. But I can recall when there were still a few tenants along that arcade, when the building wasn’t quite so run down, and I can’t help but wonder if someone arranged things so as to deliberately force the place into decline. That’s what apparently happened with the defunct Cottonwood Mall in Holladay; the landlord decided not to renew store leases and to stop maintaining the place, to essentially let it go to hell, so they could more easily make a case for demolition and building something new and shiny in its place. It’s a dirty trick in my book, but I believe it happens all the time around here. Utahns in general love the promise of the new and shiny. Me, I prefer a little history and authenticity. And Musumeci’s had a surplus of that.

The deli itself was tiny, always too hot despite the constantly whirring fans, decorated with Yankee pennants and little bits of East Coast-flavored bric-a-brac, and God help you if you made it to the counter without having decided on what you were ordering. (The owner, an immigrant from Sicily, and his son who usually manned the counter, had little patience for dithering; they were sometimes only a couple degrees warmer than Seinfeld‘s famed Soup Nazi, but that was part of the charm of the Musumeci’s experience.) You just had to close your eyes to the bugs scurrying around the arcade (the deli itself was always clean — I never saw a roach inside, only out in the unoccupied part of the building); the food was guaranteed to put an end to any uneasiness you might have felt coming in.

After hearing the news, I went to Musumeci’s for lunch yesterday, one final time while I still could. I ordered a capocollo and salami sandwich. I asked Musumeci Junior at the cash register why they were closing, and when he explained about the RDA, I told him I was sorry to hear that and I was going to miss the place. And to my great surprise, his legendary reserve actually dropped a little, and I heard genuine gratitude in his voice when he said, “Thanks, man.”

The sandwich was delicious, by the way. And as it turns out, I was caught on camera by a local newscast covering the story. The video isn’t embeddable, unfortunately, but if you’re curious, you can go here; I appear on the other side of the window at the 00:24 mark, just stepping away from the counter.

And if you’re still curious about this soon-to-be historical gem hidden in the heart of downtown, I recommend this interview with Musumeci the Elder. He’s taking advantage of the situation to retire, and he deserves some leisure, I’m sure. But damn, I’m going to miss those sandwiches.

The world keeps moving on. And the way things are going, I suspect the slick, flashy, mass-produced and franchised nonsense is soon going to be all that’s left…