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City Hall buzzing over mayor's bid to block promotional giveaway on City Hall Plaza

The Herald offers a penetrating look at efforts by City Hall to stop what the city's top property-management official called Trojan's "inappropriate and irresponsible" plan to give sex toys away on the family-friendly bricks outside City Hall.

The thrust of the Herald article, though: That pesky First Amendment thing might prevent a climactic showdown between the mayor and Trojan. The mayor himself could not be reached for comment; he's on vacation out of the country, although probably not in any sleepy Newfoundland fishing villages.

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Comments

Trojan giving away free vibrators on City Hall Plaza or the Andelmans charging $10.00 bucks a pop just to get INTO their "BBQ Beach Party" where you are then allowed the privilege of paying 8 bucks for 3 cold ribs and 8 bucks for a beer?

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You could have just put a question mark after "the Andelmans" and it would have been a sufficient statement.

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I've only been here for 5 or so years, so the seeds of this are probably before my time.

What is the exact deal with hostility toward the Andelmans? As far as I know, they are a group of brothers who own and produce an innocuous, weekly restaurant review show on one of the market's B-List TV stations. And once or twice a year, they do an event at some high profile location in or around the city featuring local restaurants, ostensibly for profit.

Aside from the fact that there tv show won't be part of any great television exhibit, I'm not sure what makes them offensive. Can someone enlighten me?

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They don't have a good rep around here.

One of their major show sponsors is The Upper Crust Pizzeria. They are known for totally screwing over their workers. They will not drop them
http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/113764-phantom-g...

They are known for throwing tantrums in public including demanding that a hostess seat them before the dining room was open and then ON AIR said
"There’s not a hostess who’s not good-looking, because they’re incompetent and can’t do anything else in life. If you can’t model, when you’re good-looking enough and not tall enough to model, you stand behind a little box and say, How many?"
http://www.servernotservant.com/2011/02/18/all-hos...

It became a public fight that even made the newspaper
http://www.servernotservant.com/2011/02/25/mike-an...

Take a look here to find out why a Food Truck banned them
http://sausagewizards.com/?p=134

Why people think their show stinks
http://www.yelp.com/topic/framingham-i-hate-phanto...

http://phantomflawed.blogspot.com/

http://www.gatheringofthevibes.com/forum/topic/372...

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/780477

http://mcslimjb.blogspot.com/2009/04/chowhound-ver...

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MC Slim JB wrote a blog post in 2009 about what it is about the Phantom Gourmet, and relatedly the Andelmans, that people find problematic.

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There's plenty of barren, windswept real estate in the wasteland around City Hall, where no one goes unless they are lost or pining for the Brutalist splendor of the Soviet regime. There's that awful "park" with nothing but concrete seating where you'd have to be catatonic to linger. Stick 'em there.

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Cue modern architecture apologists from academia to explain to the "ignorant rabble" what a masterpiece the plaza is.

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Perhaps he should hire the architects who designed the Torre Agbar:
IMAGE(https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT7vcs4P0j8MHgP7SAffGp0ri3Z1I2DgrMxYxiz1ZwR5VKBQCiL)
Maybe, we could even replace city hall with something like this, and be a true World Class City of Kevin White's dreams!

Barcelona and London can't be wrong!

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If i heard someone defend the plaza it would be first for me. Harvard has used it as a design studio site for at least 30 years addressing the many problems.

Architects, academics, art lovers and students defend the building, and rightly so, but I've yet to meet someone who loves the plaza.

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How in the world could anyone but a totalitarian sympathizer ever "defend" that horrible bunker? The building is a monstrosity.

It's a slap in the face to anyone who likes tradition, it's a slap in the face to anyone who likes cities. It's a giant concrete obstacle in the heart of Boston that sucks the life out of the area around it. It's a monument to the hubris and egotism of so-called architects. It's a testament to the folly of urban planning in the 60s and 70s.

The only good aspect of the structure is that it is a constant reminder of just how terrible that era really was, and just how close we came to destroying the rest of Boston by bulldozing it into a nightmare of drab concrete buildings, asphalt parking lots, and elevated highways.

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Alot of people, most maybe, including you it seems, find it ugly, monstrous, oppressive. Others yet find it beautiful, creative, clever, different. Neat how that works. I've never seen anything worth seeing that people all agreed on.

But I do think the plaza around it makes it impossible for some people to see the beauty of it. They can't see the tree for the forest, I guess. If the stairs down to Faneuil Hall were handled better, and if, say, there were another Quincy Market that filled the plaza site (hypothetical, not a proposal mind you!), wrapping around the building and landing at Hanover Street, more people would likely be able to see a little bit of what the select few of us see in this building. Or at worst their stated hatred may at least slacken to a puzzled indifference.

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Good point. The building itself isn't the worst part of the whole City Hall experience. It's the building standing alone in its brick desert commanding us to admire it like something out of Luxor that brings to mind words like "arrogance" or Matthew's "hubris and egotism". I bet my opinion of it would be much less negative if it were nestled into an actual neighborhood, like Scollay Square used to be.

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This is a CLASSIC example of the Streisand effect. Half of these "evil" things that go on in the city I hear about only because some city official opens their mouth and makes a big stink about it. (And of course UH dutifully reporting on it. HT, Adam).

This promotion would have come (hehe) and gone without incident, and with most people outside of those who happen to be/work in the area not knowing about it. Trojan was banking on this for free promotion and the Mayor fell right into their trap.

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Ikea knows they're family-friendly!

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UHub post a story about King Mumbles V getting pissed about plans for free dildos (double sided jello-jimmies) at City Hall! And every comment has been some incoherent ramble about the concert jungle and it abhorred building.

DID ANYONE READ THE ARTICLE?

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A UHub discussion of the mayor, derailing into angry rants about brutalist architecture downtown? That's not a bug; that's a feature.

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The article had no bicycles in it, so the regulars don't know what to talk about.

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This is going to play out just like biking in Boston. For the first decade and a half, Menino was anti bike, even mocking his staff who biked to work and firing the bike coordinator.

However, once he started biking, he realized it was fun and healthy, and wants everyone to enjoy the pleasures. Someone just needs to give him a vibrator and he'll turn on to it.

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Once he started biking? I have yet to see him cruising around Readville, and I go through there every day.

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http://www.google.com/search?q=menino+cycling&hl=e...

i'm skeptical as to just how regularly he rides but about two years ago there was a bevy of articles about how he was getting up early every morning to ride

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