Egads, I must be tapping into my heretofore unknown inner libertarian… Jeff Jacoby writes an article on blue laws and I (mostly) agree with him!
Since I’m on the subject of blue laws, let me bring up another yet somehow related ongoing gripe of mine: the tight restraints on liquor licensing in this town. A little insight from the August Boston magainze summarizes the problem best (sorry, no online version):
Another problem [for restaurant culture] is the limited availability of liquor […]
Please, God, no…
I’m optimistic enough to think that tourists want to visit Boston because it’s not Planet Hollywood.
Big news today (from here, via Universal Hub) is the Brattle Theatre’s call for help, specifically a warning that if it doesn’t meet $400,000 fundraising goal it’s going to shut its doors. Part of it’s a story of the changes Harvard Square has seen, facing both "mallification" and retail recession. As their website complains,
BFF and […]
The moving market must have big gaping holes that entrepreneurs are rushing in to fill. Around Jamaica Plain, I have seen signs for Man with a Van, who is clearly targeting those beneath the price-threshold of professional movers but without transportation of their own. At the other end of the market, Metrosexual Movers offer a […]
I swear it’s coincidence that the book club is taking up What’s the Matter with Kansas? the same week that TPMCafe is starting their book club with the very same. Sadly, this blog has neither budget nor clout to fly Thomas Frank to Boston to join us. But I heartily recommend reading and joining us […]
Proctor and Gamble looks set to buy Gillette. Dan Kennedy sees this as more proof of David Nyhan’s "Boston isn’t Run by Bostonians Anymore" thesis. And like other buyouts (Hancock, cough cough), this one seems to me at least to be another milking of longterm company value to extract short-term shareholder value before dumping the […]
…well, not yet.
One of the oddest dislocations about living in a city undergoing a housing bubble is the dizzying transformation of neighborhoods. But, having experienced so much of that the last few year, it’s now shocking to me to see when gentrification efforts fail. Witness these latest attempts in JP and Mission Hill that get […]
Gee, I hope the new proposed History Museum for the Big Dig Greenway will turn out less cheesy than it looks in the sketches. If not, I fear it could go the way of Dreams of Freedom.
But the accompanying article is what has me a little concerned:
The unusual Boston Museum Project…would fulfill seemingly conflicting […]
Robert David Sullivan and Rachel Deyette Werkema of Commonwealth Magazine have a short piece in the Globe’s Ideas section giving graphic representation to the increasing unaffordability of Massachusetts housing. The following charts show the multiple of MA median income of the average house purchase price in the Commonwealth’s communities.
1999
2002
(source: Boston Globe, 4/9/04)
The median to […]
Brad DeLong comments on the housing bubble article I’d mentioned a few days ago.
Given the restrictions on supply–the unwillingness of San Francisco or Cambridge neighborhoods to look more like the Upper West Side or Newbury Street, the unwillingness of Berkeley and Lexington neighborhoods to look more like San Francisco or Cambridge, et cetera–the only […]
Last week Greater Boston had an interesting feature on film production in Boston. Essentially, the piece focused on two recent trends as a collective sign of Boston’s up-and-coming status as a force in the film industry. First, local producers, in particular Scout Productions, have scored big-time hits (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) and […]
I’ve been wondering for some time now how the Chinatown bus operators could make money charging only ten bucks from Boston to New York. Now, from the investigate desks of Time Out NY (sadly, story not linked at their website) comes word that the Chinatown bus lines have been locked not only in a price […]
In the face of gloomy assessments of Boston’s future after Bank of America’s buyout of Fleet (and Manulife’s buyout of John Hancock recently), David Warsh sees a familiar economic cycle, using the history of Boston’s refrigeration-ice industry as an anecdote:
By 1833, Tudor was shipping ice halfway around the world Â- 180 tons to Calcutta. By […]
The Phoenix has noted before a major inconsistency in Mayor Menino’s economic development vision for the city: he touts that the new Convention Center will boost convention travel and tourism manyfold, yet opposes runway expansion at Logan Airport as unnecessary. Clearly, on each end he is caving into interests - East Boston neighborhood forces and […]