Robert David Sullivan 2

How to close all of Boston's gay bars in one swoop

Send in a bunch of police-who-look-like-porn-stars to hit on men twice their age. Andy Humm reports in the Gotham Gazette:

Robert Pinter, a 52-year-old gay man who was arrested for prostitution at the Blue Door in the East Village on Oct. 10, spoke at the town hall meeting. He said a young man — a 29-year old undercover cop who, Pinter said, looked even younger — cruised him in the store. He was "charming and persistent, and we agreed to go home for consensual sex, but as we were leaving he said, 'I want to pay you $50 [to have sex].' I didn't respond, but I thought it was strange," Pinter recounted. As the men left the store, Pinter said, a group of men who did not show police identification pushed him against the wall

"I thought I'd been set up by a gang," he said. "I asked them why they were doing this to me. I was totally clueless. They handcuffed me and said, 'Why the f--- do you think we're arresting you — loitering for the purpose of prostitution.'"...

Following a spate of arrests at another porn shop, the Unicorn in Chelsea, the city sued to close it, citing the arrests by undercover officers.

(Hat tip: JoeMyGod.)

I'm not saying that Bostonians would want to shut down gay bars and porn shops on moral grounds. It's more about their effects on property values. I'm just saying, if someone younger and more attractive approaches you at the Eagle, tell him upfront that anything you do is on the house.

Short blocks mean fewer traffic accidents

Urban studies pioneer Jane Jacobs stressed the importance of short blocks in building a sense of community. New Urban News reports that neighborhoods with more intersections (and fewer cul de sacs) are also safer, in part because motorists have to repeatedly slow down. Philip Langdon summarizes a new study by transportation researchers Wesley Marshall and Norman Garrick:

New urbanists often identify “connectivity” as a critical factor in street design. Marshall and Garrick suggest that the focus should be defined a bit differently. They say that what matters most, from the perspective of reducing deaths in traffic accidents, is how many intersections there are in a given land area. The more dangerous cities had 41 percent fewer intersections per square mile. (In the lingo of Marshall and Garrick, this measure is “real intersection density.”)

A street network with low intersection density might have fewer than 81 intersections per square mile. A street network with high density — which is much safer — might have more than 225 intersections per square mile. With a high number of intersections per square mile, fatalities decline and the frequency of severe injuries decreases, too. Communities with many small blocks — a description that fits many older cities and new urbanist developments — tend to have more intersections.

Suggestion: Go to your next neighborhood meeting with a list of blocks that could be cut in half. And fight pedestrian bridges that allow cars to accelerate to highway speeds (like this thankfully abandoned project).

The newest crime drama from CBS?

The New York Times reports that "garbage collectors" have become an important source of information for local police:

Drivers’ tips have led to drug-trafficking arrests, Mr. Henschen said, and to the discovery of a corpse in a home that had gone so long without having any trash that a driver grew suspicious...

Riding high in the cab of a garbage truck, it is impossible not to notice things. Signs of family life are evident in trash: a birth is announced by a crib’s big cardboard box, the aging of children shown in the abandonment of a kiddie pool. Garbage collectors are also informal, hands-on economists, [collector Gary Garcia] said, explaining that when times are good, everyone produces more garbage and that the absence of trash is often a sign of a foreclosed home...

I can't wait to see Dross, a crime drama about a sanitation worker who's also a special consultant to the police, and who can see things in the trash that escape the attention of everyone on CSI. The cross-over episode with Monk should be hilarious.

Taco Bell to anchor Harvard Square!

Harvard Square's Out of Town News is slated to close after 53 years, making the neighborhood a little less literary. (Such bookstores as Wordsworth and Reading International are long gone.) Fortunately, the space won't be empty for long, according to Mike Mennonno:

KFC/Taco Bell have expressed an interest in the property! 

The restaurant chain could lend some much-needed permanence to the ever-changing square, and put something truly useful back at this crossroads of the commerce and culture in Cambridge.  I mean, print media is so last millennium, but who doesn't like fried chicken and tacos — UNDER ONE ROOF!  It's practically recession-proof!

I sense sarcasm, as well as complete fabrication.

But what else can we hope for, other than a more upscale eatery? Just about every other form of business that can serve as an urban meeting place -- bookstores, music stores, movie theaters, and even home furnishing stores -- is on the ropes. "Browseries," where one can kill time without necessarily buying something, are becoming extinct. Eating and drinking seem to be the only activity that can sustain a streetside business these days. (Matt Yglesias was properly astonished by a zoning law in a commercial district of Washington, D.C., limiting restaurants to 25 percent of total sidewalk frontage. Boston's North End and South End would cease to exist under such a law.)

Cross-posted at Beyond Red & Blue.