Meanwhile, a dirty little biweekly newspaper was assembling a fleet of writing personalities. Ronnie Polaneczky was enlisted to write City Beat, the mischievous li'l news section. 'Twas also the year CP added Frank Blank on rock, Deborah Scoblionkov on wine, and the delicious Dinty Moore, who dipped his ladle regularly into the performance art stew. And Mike McGettigan, who spent all of 1984 writing letters to the editor, was brought on board as a fiery, knee-jerk columnist called The Downshouter. On the advertising side, we finally credited a young go-getter named Paul Curci—hustling for us since 1983—in the masthead.

With this dream team in place, we reported on Joan Specter's push for a smoking ordinance that would require restaurants with 50 or more seats to accommodate nonsmokers. "It would be almost impossible for us to have a nonsmoking section," countered the owner of the Melrose Diner. "We don't have a problem, though, because we have a chemical system that draws smoke away from the customers and sends it into the kitchen."

The first of City Paper's longstanding "Better Know a Street" series debuted with a photo essay on Ridge Ave. Polaneczky wrote about bike shop owner Jerry Casale's pie-in-the-sky dream of bringing an international bike race to the Parkway and up Levering Street. We held our first fiction contest (winners: W.R. Morton and Justine Gudenas). Ann DeForest literally matched wits with "The Umbrella Man" statue at 17th and Locust streets. Noel Weyrich interviewed the city's first recycling czar and talked to Running Press editor Tam Mossman, a "witty, erudite and civilized" man who also happened to "talk to disembodied 'critters' from beyond." If you squint, '85 looks a bit like modern times. Mayor Goode pulled a George Bush, appointing the commission that would investigate his possible misdeeds in the MOVE bombing. The citizens of Philadelphia, currently waiting for the wireless Godot, were back then impatiently awaiting the arrival of cable television. And we made a big deal out of our anniversary, our fourth, trumpeting in an editorial: "we offer informed analysis. None of us has the time to even consider all the information coming at us every day. And we certainly don't have time for half-baked opinions propped up by half-truths." Amen.