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Too much glassware flying around Boston bars; board to look at possible glass crackdown
By adamg on Tue, 02/21/2017 - 11:30am
The Boston Licensing Board will consider forcing bars to give up glassware and drinks in glass bottles if their patrons get injured in attacks with them.
"It's seems like we're seeing a lot of that now," board Chairwoman Christine Pulgini said following two hearings today, one involving a patron at Minibar who appeared to attack another with a glass, another involving a patron at a Langham Hotel bar who now faces criminal charges for allegedly smacking another patron in the back of the head with a beer bottle.
Pulgini noted another incident at the Boston Beer Garden in South Boston in December, in which a man suffered possibly permanent brain injuries after being punched in the head by a man clenching a glass salt shaker. In 2010, a man died when somebody threw a glass beer mug in a fight at a Fenway bar, which shattered and sent a large shard into the man's neck.
Pulgini said the board will likely meet soon to consider a new policy in which bars and restaurants whose patrons wield glassware or bottles as weapons in fight have their licenses amended to include a ban on the service of drinks in glass.
"Public safety is of the utmost importance to the board," she said.
In the first of two glass-related hearings today, the board heard about an incident at Minibar on Exeter Street involving a man jealous his fiancee was talking to another guy and a glass. As the night wore down on Dec. 28, the man went after the chatty man, first with his fists and then with a glass, which he threw at him, a police report states. A bar attorney and bartender, however, said that while the victim was bonked with a glass, that only happened after the two battlers and the bartender, trying to break up the fight, fell to the ground. The victim fled before police arrived; witnesses and the bartender disputed the offended man's assertion that he was forced into action when he saw the other guy lift up his fiancee's shirt and grope her.
Pulgini askd bar attorney Karen Simao why Minibar was even using glassware. It's a high-end place, Simao said, adding the issue is not the method of attack, but whether Minibar could have foreseen it would happen, which she said it couldn't have, because it was a slow night and the few people left in the place were all at the bar and seemed to be quiet and having a good time, until suddenly the man launched his attack.
"It might be high end but [the patrons] are not acting high end," Pulgini replied.
In another hearing, the Langham Hotel on Franklin Street had to answer for an incident in which some sort of dispute over one guest's wife led to another guest smashing him in the back of the head with a beer bottle, sending him to the hospital. The alleged beer-bottle smasher now faces a criminal charge of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, thanks in part to hotel staffers, who changed the code on the man's room, so that when he showed up at the front desk later that morning to complain, workers were able to stall him long enough to summon police, who arrested him.
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Comments
Should they start serving
Should they start serving drinks in sippy cups and beers in baby bottles? Great use of tax payer dollars on this one...
and when the next self important,
shitfaced millennial stabs someone with a bottle or glass we'll have the proverbial "why didn't they do something about that"...
yay
YES no more bottles! Just plastic cups.
cue the environmental argument in 3...2...1......
Issue with plastic cups
A lot of bars already use them on weekends when it's busier. In many cases, they're smaller pours but no less exspensive.
We should learn from Europe:
We should learn from Europe: put drink sizes on the menu, and make sure each glass or cup has a labelled line at that number of ounces.
I definitely
lol'd IRL when I read this comment. Over dramatic much?
Maybe juice boxes?
Maybe juice boxes?
With This Logic....
Keg Stands are in theory more safe than 99.44%+ of the people acting responsibly with their glassware.
Might be time to ban forks, knives, chairs, tables, salt shakers, etc.
I guess acting like you are in party in the quad with Red Solo Cups has been the safest bet all along.
The first barrel of Busch Light Draft Dry is on me folks.
Thanks
I am going to have a Copley Plaza $14 martini in a plastic cup.
Who is this woman?
Wow
This is a big *eye roll*....
Nothing says classy like a drink served in a plastic cup. Can't wait to see some of these high end bars with their fancy drinks served in plastic cups.
And I understand why some places do plastic cups.. sheer volume (saves on dish washing), and yes rowdy patrons. But if you're going to force it for some, it needs to be for all. What is good for the goose, is good for the gander...
This lady needs to get out more
God I hate lawyers. "might be high end but the patrons don't act high end" might be the most arrogant thing I have heard in years. HOW ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO CONTROL PEOPLE WHO COME IN YOUR ESTABLISHMENT?!?!
Will they have to replace the dinnerware with plastic plates and silverware? Will patrons need to check their shoes at the door? Their phones?
WHAT"S NEXT?
Anything can be used as a weapon if you are mad enough.
Someone should go to a council meeting and demonstrate this fact to them in person.
What a waste of time/resources and money. This board is quite literally USELESS.
You're supposed to do exactly that
An establishment is expected to do exactly that. Some combination of how the establishment is marketed, how the staff interact with the patrons, decor, music, etc. sets the overall tone, and the overall tone influences behavior. You don't hear about a lot of brawling at (for a high-end example) the Four Seasons, nor (to point out that it's not about economics) at the quiet, neighborhood taproom.
So to test your theory
I'll get dressed up and go to the Four Seasons tonight, grab a glass, and brain the bar-tender....and then the licensing board will make them serve drinks in solo cups....right?
It's the nanny state gone mad!
THIS
'High End' folks have the $ for the drugs and booze, and often (not always) are extremely entitled and prone to 'bad' behavior. And anyone, 'high end' or 'low class" can get into 'high end' bars and clubs, as long as they can get past the doormen.
glass crackdown
Hmm, subtle. Nice one, Adam.
Boston
A world class city, where your wine is served in a Solo cup
Lets see here
Out of the thousands of drinks sold since 2010, there have apparently have been a total of FOUR incidents. So naturally, we have to ban establishments from using glasswear all together.
Here's a better alternative. If somebody uses glasswear as a weapon, how about we PROSECUTE and TRY the INDIVIDUAL for assault, and leave the bar out of it completely. Instead we get somebody proposing another bureaucratic measure that dictates how a business can conduct their business.
Personally, I haven't had an adult beverage in twenty years. But the thought of drinking a fine wine in a plastic cup or plastic "glass" makes me cringe.
If somebody uses glasswear as
You mean like that scene in Cinderella where she takes off her slipper and starts beating someone with it?
But but but but
But that would be COMMON SENSE.. something we've seen this board has zero of.
Our tolerance for brawling shows itself again
I don't have data to back this up, but it is my impression that other parts of the country take a dimmer view of assault and battery than we seem to, here. Fer cryin' out loud, lock up the people who engage in bar fights and the problem sort of solves itself.
Maybe just ban jealous
Maybe just ban jealous husbands from bars.
All the assailants were male?
Might as well be super ultra safe and ban all males.
(/snark)
Nanny State
This reeks of nanny state. Besides, if a low class individual is going to give someone bops on the head with a bottle, they will just as easily use something else if the bottle is not available. Like a chair or a shoe. Should we make all establishments look like padded cells because of a few morons?
softer bill holders?
they way those things fly around they should really do something.
This Pulgini woman's question
This Pulgini woman's question regarding why Minibar was using glassware (because we're adults? because we live in a civilized society?) is too asinine to warrant a response and her snide comeback is beyond the pale. I also see that she's a high dollar Walsh contributor and one of his appointees after the big shakeup. Shocking. I commend Ms. Simao for keeping her composure. This is all just utter nonsense.
Best quote
I feel for the businesses that have to answer to these knuckleheads.
If you outlaw glass salt shakers
only outlaws will have glass salt shakers.
Wait, that can't be right, because that would be a completely asinine, myopic thing to say. And I for one can hardly believe that our very own beloved licensing board would be wasting their time contemplating something this breathtakingly stupid.
To quote Governor LePetimaine
Not drinking a $9 beer out of a plastic cup
This is ridiculous. Proper glassware is critical in the beverage industry. Did anyone bother checking to see, oh, I don't know, if the patrons were overserved? This is not a problem that needs solving.
Mad Hatter
The Mad Hatter was a disco on Necco Street in Boston back in the 70's. On Friday nights they had a "Drink and Drown" event which didn't allow glasses or glass bottles to be served. Plastic cups were the drink ware. Too many injuries from glasses or bottles tossed around inside the bar! I thought we've become more civilized but I guess not.
I despise the "something must
I despise the "something must be done" attitude that our lawmakers have for every minor issue with a passion, but I despise the voters that demand such an attitude from them even more.
Restrictions
Place these new restrictions on the 151 new liquor licenses Mahty wants to give out.
Or they could, you know,
Or they could, you know, start yanking licenses which is the remedy already in place to ensure license holders stay in a cooperative mood. This is just pussy-footing around the issue. I could easily foresee a situation where a license holder who has been deglazed would be able to lobby to have their glass license reinstated after remaining (inevitably) glass-injury free for a time. And as has been mentioned above we definitely need to prosecute harder too.
BTW, I worked at a bar where we used plastic cups on weekend nights and glasses the rest of the time. We constantly got complaints from patrons claiming the plastic cup didn't hold the same amount, so we would pour the contents of their plastic cup into one of the regular glasses, let the excess overflow onto the bar, poured the remaining booze back into the plastic cup, and handed their now slightly-less-full plastic cup back to them with an apology for our mistake.
lol at this
given the amount of shitty ass bars ive been in where idiots are carrying guns, really, the glasses being a concern are a joke
I'm awaiting a future headline
Bar shut down after patrons didn't properly wash their hands. Officers making overtime on the taxpayer dime, noticed a male customer only use one spirt of soap instead of the required two. Because this is a second instance for the bar, the first being when they were caught not making sure customers properly wiped their ass after using their toilets, the owner will be publicly flogged for having the audicity to try to run a business in a nanny state.
A thought exercise
The mayor has just named you the new chairperson of the Boston Licensing Board. Every Tuesday, you sit through a dozen or so hearings about various infractions at Boston bars and restaurants. You start noticing a growing number of citations involve patrons getting smashed in the head with glass objects - glasses, bottles and, yes, even salt shakers.
What do you do to try to reduce the number of such incidents?
Answer
You start by quantifying the problem. Your brain can't be trusted to adequately pick out patterns in the data on its own. It's awful at it. It biases for most recent events and drops all of the items down a memory hole that don't fit the pattern it starts to see on its own.
Only by algorithmically reviewing ALL of the data in an unbiased manner will you determine if what you're seeing is a real pattern or just a brain fart. THEN, even if you see a pattern developing, you continue to observe for a while to determine if you can extrapolate at all or if what you're seeing is random chance that a bunch have seemingly grouped up and risen where there was no priors before. You determine how many you'd have to keep seeing for it to be so unlikely to be random dumb luck that you can finally call it an actual trend.
Finally, you have a trend. Oh ho, but you don't have a cause! You have to consider what the cause might be and how you're going to act on the cause. Most likely your brain is lying to you about the likely cause because, again, it's dumb and can't be trusted to do causal inference on the fly. Time to go back to analyzing the data and determining what else has trended and whether the two trends can be decoupled or not.
Ok, *finally*, you've got a trend and a causal analysis. Now you need to develop a solution and determine if it's going to actually reverse the trend or not. What are its side-effects going to be (is it over-bearing? is it not strong enough? is it too broad?)...I mean we could just close all the bars in town permanently to end the use of glassware as weapons...but that's going to have too many side-effects. So, what's the minimal effort that obtains the desired effect of reversing the trend?
THEN you can act.
"Growing Trend"
Growing trend of people smacked with glassware OR a growing trend of such events being reported?
I seem to remember a time in Boston when the cops couldn't be bothered with something like this, and a bar wouldn't have bothered to report it. The ER would be the only place that it would register.
That's why systematic surveillance is necessary, per Kaz, above.
If I got named chairperson?
I would do jack (expletive), because most of my friends in Boston are bar employees, and I get paid whether I punish bars or not. So I just wouldn't. I'll let vigilantism take its course, seeing as how there is no police department in these scenarios.
What a worthless (expletive) Pulgini is. (Expletive) her and (expletive) Marty Walsh. Vote for a person who is a registered Democrat again.*
*Amended in this instance to reflect the non-partisan status of municipal elections
actually
remember that time you suggested black people shouldnt be let in bars because they aren't civilized?
Most of my friends in Boston are bar employees...
So you get paid anyway? Which is exactly evidence of what?
Are you aware that not one of your statement is connected to the next. Honestly, my intent is not to pick on you but, man, shouldn't your comment have something to do with something?
I mean really, what in the name of all that is holy, are you trying to say?
You introduced the topics of getting paid whether you punish bars or not, letting vigilantism take it course, no police department in these scenarios, call a couple of politicians names, tell two people to go "expletive" themselves, who to vote for in next election and something undecernable about your non-partisan status in munipal elections.
I guess you had a point but back here on earth it seems to have been lost in the translation.
Simple Solution
Ban dudebros and the bars that cater to them.
Then you will have a much smaller set of infractions to review and can spend more time crafting thoughtful solutions for them.
Please define
What's a dudebro? Should we also ban Gays because they molest children? Jews because they're cheap and will skip out on the check? Black because they're scary and dangerous?
In y'all's eagerness to rant about "the nanny state"...
...several people seem to be missing an important point.
So, you can still drink your classy wine from a glass in your classy wine bar as long as the classy wine bar doesn't become the kind of place where people wield the classy wine glasses as weapons. Otherwise, it's gonna become a Solo cup establishment, and that will tell you something too. Next time maybe read the stuff that's right up there at the top of the thread before flying off the handle, ok?
You seem to be missing the
You seem to be missing the important point that many people have zero confidence in this board and its ability to apply such an amendment reasonably. This board doesn't need more power. Next time maybe consider context before scolding, okay?
In your eagerness to rant at us
Minibar and a bar at the 5-star Langham Hotel in the Financial District are the catalysts for this discussion and thus could have fallen prey to this suggested new restriction but are classy cocktail locales.
Neither incident indicates that it's the "kind of place where people wield glassware" and yet, they're the reason the chairperson even raised the spectre of outlawing glassware for places where this occurs.
The guy doesn't even live in Boston
Of course he's got lots of "rules" for those of us who do!
What a poorly written sentence
Fixed.