Removing blank location block causes 404 errors

[drhowarddrfine at charter.net]

I'm new to nginx and had this in my conf file which I had copied some 
time ago but never filled it in and continued building a test page with 
images, css and javascript:

location ~* 
^.+\.(css|js|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|gz|svg|svgz|ttf|otf|woff|eot|mp4|ogg|ogv|webm|pdf)$ 
{
}

Today, I deleted that block and now the images, css and javascript files 
are all returned a 404. I don't understand what's going on.
I'm using version 1.5.11
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