Citizen complaint of the day: A simply ghastly sign on Beacon Hill

Unless you link to the relevant statute, your assertion of what the law says remains an assertion. As someone noted, signage laws often have real-estate exemptions. We won't know whether the law you're referring to has such an exemption unless somebody links to it. Since you're the one making the claim, the somebody is properly you.

It.is.advertising.

BH doesn't allow solicitation. It's the same sort of thing as up in Stowe, VT where McDonalds can't have the arches and must conform to a paint colour standard.

"Broken Windows" has lost much of its original credibility, now that we have 25+ years of experience with it:

--When J. Q. Wilson first published his hypothesis in 1982-- and that's what it was, not a theory-- by his own admittance, he did not have enough evidence to back the idea that by addressing the small things, overall crime might be diminished. However, it was quickly glommed on to by many folks including Koch and Bratton as if it were fact. Eventually, Wilson himself, dazzled by being hailed as a genius, forgot that even he cautioned that correlation is not causation and further research was needed.

--The original 1982 proposition only addressed the idea that reducing property crime and street crime would reduce more dangerous crime. While it's reasonable to assume that property values improve if street crime is reduced, Wilson did not posit that "broken windows" will increase or stabilize values. He was looking at ways of ending white flight and making the majority law-abiding citizens of crime-ridden neighborhoods safe, not protecting property values per se.
To put it another way, you could do all the "Broken Windows" policing you want in the middle of Detroit but it still won't bring back the factory jobs that caused the unemployment and depressed property values.

-- The obvious problem is that the type of crime targeted ends up criminalizing a class of people. White collar crime is not diminished in "broken windows" target zones. Domestic crimes are not lower. The crimes targeted are crimes mostly committed by the poor or homeless. "Broken Windows" doesn't end poverty; it treats a symptom of it by imprisoning people for minor crimes.

Right now, a large scale study of "Broken Windows" is being done at UT (I think; definitely a Texas university). This will be the first controlled review, ever, of BW.

Not Brockton, but take Nantucket compared with say New Bedford. Yes, there some differences so I'm oversimplifying but basically you have two seaside towns, rundown whaling ports (you laugh, but Nantucket was in very grim straits for years after the collapse of the whaling industry--that's why there are very few Victorian buildings on the island and there was very little building in general and the pre-1850 buildings were preserved). In the 1960s, one guy bought up a huge part of the downtown waterfront and really kicked up the whole historic preservation thing. Rules and regulations up the wazoo and it helped turn the island, for better or worse, into a kind of museum and a huge tourist attraction and money magnet. Like beacon Hill, there are hundreds of properties for sale but you're not allowed to have a For Sale sign on your lawn. You're not allowed to have a magenta door or vinyl siding or a thousand other things. New Bedford...whole different story.

Can we please stop contributing to the ignorance and misinformation regarding the handicap ramps in BH?

There were gas stations there too (not sure if any remain open today)