Wu Green-Lights Street Dining Everywhere Except North End
Don’t let Mayor Michelle Wu destroy the North End!
Fight back—take a stroll down Hanover Street (or Salem or Parmenter or Prince) and support one or another of the small businesses and restaurants being operated by the local 21st century Sons of Liberty.
Your tax dollars are being used to systematically asphyxiate the North End. So aside from utter tastiness, purchasing that bowl of pasta or a cannoli is your patriotic response to tyrannical mayoral assault.
The struggle first began back when the Baker administration implemented the arbitrary, illogical, and anti-scientific measures on all Bay State restaurant owners, supposedly unrelated to the cries of Trump Must Go!
Remember when you could only dine with five other people, because the mere presence of your sixth friend was bound to kill everyone with coronavirus?
Remember when you couldn’t go out for just-a-drink because purchasing food was safer? Or when you were shuffled out of the place mid-bite because of the 90-minute policy?
Remember when every establishment was forced to stick an employee at the door to check everyone’s immunization records before he could enter the premises?
Remember when COVID would attack you if you weren’t back in your house by 9:30 weeknights, but on weekends the armistice with the virus was extended to 10:30 p.m.?
If all that wasn’t enough to rub restaurant owners in Boston’s North End the wrong way, when some businesses aimed to make up some lost revenue by placing tables outside—where the city said COVID can’t get you—the newly elected Mayor Michelle Wu chose to further suffocate the neighborhood.
Last spring Wu’s payroll patriots effected a seasonal fee for North End eateries seeking outdoor dining: $7,500 plus $480 for every potential parking space used.
“That’s 625 plates of pasta I need to sell to break even. That’s a lot of pasta,” Christian Silvestri, owner of Rabia’s Dolce Fumo, told WCVB last year.
Here’s where it gets even more oppressive. From Back Bay to Brookline, no other Boston neighborhood faced the fee. Only the North End.
When a group of four North End restaurant owners decided to sue the city over the geographically—if not ethnically—discriminatory policy, Wu responded with a letter threatening to rescind outdoor dining completely for the traditionally Italian neighborhood.
“The citywide pilot program for outdoor dining in 2020 and 2021 was meant to help provide support for restaurants struggling from the pandemic,” the letter said.
If you haven’t heard, our national overlords decided the Panic is over as of May 11, which creates a little problem for Wu and her coat holders. Boston’s era of lockdowns and restrictions proved outdoor street dining is possible, lucrative, and enjoyable. There’s no good reason not to keep it.
This spring, Wu is offering street and sidewalk dining for a fee: $399 for restaurants with liquor licenses, $199 for restaurants without. Each location must also submit professional site plans to receive authorization from the dukes and duchesses of equity.
But guess which Boston neighborhood is barred from applying for street dining altogether?
Some Italian-American restauranteurs believe this is part of a pattern of ethnic discrimination, especially after the city’s decision not to return the statue of Christopher Columbus, decapitated by radical antifa extremists during the summer of 2020, to its original place in Waterfront Park.
Jorge Mendoza, owner of Monica’s Inc., who has been very vocal in the fight against the discriminatory policies, joined Howie’s show yesterday to address the issue.
“Why is it that we aren’t treated like other minorities?” Mendoza asked. “What’s so special about us—that makes us different—that [Wu] should target us?”
The Wu administration claims the problem is the predicted increased traffic caused by various infrastructure projects. This will lead to fewer parking spots, City Hall claims.
Mendoza offers a different solution to the ongoing parking problem: get rid of the bike lanes.
Wu’s 2022 notice wasn’t subtle in the real reason behind the suffocation. “The use of public street space to expand restaurant capacity and liquor license seats is particularly significant in the North End, with many restaurants doubling their capacity through expansion into the street.”
There it is. Michelle Wu and her gang cannot bear seeing small businesses succeed on their own, especially if they’ll ruin the “economic equity” playing field Wu vowed to level. An opportunity for Italian-Americans—nowadays deemed “white” and part of “the majority”—to double revenue will make the “equity” Wu wants harder to achieve.
If her Office of Economic Opportunity and Inclusion had its way, the wonderful old North End of Paul Revere and Honey Fitz and so many other historical figures would be razed, and upon the ruins would be plopped a brutalist chrome prism with a cubicle for each carefully selected restaurant. A quota would be placed on the number of straight white male food and beverage licenses distributed.
Each eatery would have the same number of tables. Every menu would be devoid of red meat.
Revenue among businesses is identical, competition doesn’t exist, and Mike’s and Modern would be consolidated in the name of pastry equity and inclusion.
“Are we going back to the days of ‘Italians Need Not Apply?’” asked Mendoza. “It was discriminatory then. It’s discriminatory today.”
“We are going to fight against it,” he assured. “We’ve got more people joining. This is not the end of the battle.”
