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Hey, Massholes: Stop jumping into the harbor from the Atlantic Beer Garden
By adamg on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 10:39am
The Atlantic Beer Garden found itself before the Boston Licensing Board this morning to explain why somebody jumped off its roof while holding a fake Stanley Cup on June 18.
It faces an additional hearing for another incident within the past month in which another man eating dinner on a waterside deck decided to take a swim as well.
Restaurant attorney Jeremiah Sullivan said the Bruins jump was not something the restaurant could have anticipated and that in response, the restaurant has installed a fence and is meeting with local police to try to keep people from scaling to the top of the restaurant's roof again. The topmost part of the restaurant is not public and already had a fence.
"How did a man with a fake Stanley Cup get over that without being noticed by anyone?" board Chairwoman Nicole Murati Ferrer asked. Restaurant manager Joseph Primo said nobody noticed the guy climbing up there because it was a very busy night.
Police Sgt. Robert Mulvey said the Bruins jumper attracted quite the crowd. "The crowd was very agitated and excited about what had happened and encouraged him to do it again."
Primo acknowledge he did not call police. He said that in hindsight, he should have, but the jumper left quickly and there appeared to be no safety issues once he left.
The board decides Thursday what action, if any, to take related to the Bruins incident.
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Comments
Awesome
Even though I'm an adult, with a fully developed sense of what is right and wrong, I'm going to go to a bar, act like a total asshole, and let the establishment take the blame!
NMF is still a babe, though.
Jerks will be jerks
What more can the restaurant do than restrain people, then face a lawsuit?
"Local police"?
Which police is dat? Boston? Massport? State? Environmental?
BPD
A BPD lt. and sgt. both testified.
Practice dive?
Context?
I mean, how can the city allow itself to be promoted as an urban cliff diving locale on one hand but then turn around and whine when they attract the crazies to jump off buildings into the harbor?
That's cause it's classy to
That's cause it's classy to jump off a museum and just trashy to jump off a bar =)
Ferrer Day Care
I wonder if this woman expects all adults to be babysat at all times? I know there is a local culture of "run wild when not being completely stomped down", but I don't see why a business that is restricted to catering to legal adults is expected to be run like a daycare center with booze.
She seriously needs to just get over herself.
Well said, Swirly
I don't care how cute she is, she completely sucks on a professional level.
Like, I understand that everybody needs to work, and I don't fault her for having a phoney baloney job. But Jesus, lady, you don't have to take it THAT seriously. Just gently scold 'em, take your paycheck, and let the world keep spinning.
Grandstanding
My real issue with her is that she is a reactionary and a grandstanding self-promoter with only a thin veneer of care about public safety. It is all about getting attention - her actions don't seem to be grounded in research into what works for controlling nasty outcomes of alcohol use and what doesn't. Its all about power, control and LOOK AT ME!
She does serve a purpose.
She does serve a purpose. When nightclubs become a problem for the community and the police she's the one that can bring them under control by either suspending their license or rolling back their hours.
Nightclubs aren't a problem for the community
People who don't learn how to drink properly are a problem for the community.
She's a puppet of Basketball Deval's jobs program who gets a check to yell at people. Again, I don't begrudge somebody for taking the money, but just do it and leave the rest of us alone. Least she's not as bad as the scumbag Pokaski that preceded her.
Can you provide the studies
Can you provide the studies that document this alleged culture?
My husband taught Catholic School
That's enough of a study considering the extensive influence that institution has on the culture of the area. Kids were not taught self control - they were either given no freedom to exercise it, or they were given no supervision and no expectation of it.
See also "masshole drivers and pedestrians and cyclists", who believe that laws don't matter unless there is somebody around to force them to obey them.
For a case study, see the little creeps down the street who are either being screamed at and browbeat by their parents or showing what "lack of judgement" really means in the woods or getting in trouble for impulsive behavior or bullying at school.
So where do you draw the
So where do you draw the line?
Darwin award candidate?
I do find that "nobody noticed him" is a bit hard to swallow, as the entire crowd on the deck was egging him on. And it probably wouldn't have been a bad idea to call the cops when he first climbed up there.
What else could they do, send a bouncer up after him to try to wrestle him down?
I don't see what reasonable measures they could have taken which would have stopped him- they had a fence, the roof obviously isn't a public space, etc.
Just because the guy wanted to take his chances on winning a darwin award, it doesn't seem like the bar should be responsible.
I do find that "nobody
I do find that "nobody noticed him" is a bit hard to swallow, as the entire crowd on the deck was egging him on.
Why? I expect the waiters try real hard not to pay attention to the crowds when they get loud. It's one of those defense mechanisms that helps you keep your will to live when your job is to wait on drunk stupid people.
Uhh...
Am I the only person who realizes that the bar did not know whether this was a perfectly healthy, "normal" adult? What if you got up from the table to go to the bathroom, left your 9 year old there, came back and he had jumped into the water? I am positive almost everyone would blame the bar for not noticing.
If the bar said, "oh we knew he was a perfectly sane, mentally healthy male over the age of 18, so we decided not to intervene" that's one thing, but not knowing whether or not kids, or say developmentally disabled people are jumping from your premises is another.
What 9 year old could get up there?
This was an adult who should be responsible for his own actions.
Since when ...
... are waitstaff expected to babysit children or developmentally disabled patrons while their caretakers visit the bathroom?
If a child or charge lacks the self control to refrain from climbing the walls and jumping off of the roof, a caretaker has two choices: don't leave them unattended, or bring another adult whose job it is to supervise them.
Waitstaff are not default babysitters to children, develomentally disabled persons, or presumed adults.
Quite true
You don't leave a young child unattended and simply hope for the best.
Lucky he didn't hit any submerged objects
Being the old port that it is, there are submerged pilings, boulders etc. on the margin all over Boston Harbor from long forgotten piers and wharves. In addition, on any given weekend, you can hear on the marine radio numerous reports of objects like chunks of telephone poles and wood from abandoned docks drifting just beneath the surface. This guy and the bar are lucky he wasn't paralyzed or killed. These new seaport venues should address the problem before that happens.
Heaven Forfend
... that adults be expected to act like adults and take full responsibility for their own behavior!
Here I thought reactionary right wingers like you were all about responsibility and against the nanny state.
I suppose you want a review of the liquor license for the Marriot Copley Place - they should keep the good china from being stacked in the kitchens lest some drunken fool go on a rampage?
Simple precautions like fences make sense. Fulltime babysitting is pure stupidity - unless, of course, your goal is to require each citizen hire a full time personal police detail "just in case" ...
We have a culture of drunkenness
If some bar's customer is able to jump off the building while they're open, the bar should expect to rightly be called to discuss the matter. If a business is serving a drug that impairs judgment and modifies personality, they're a great first line of protection when someone's drinking gets out of hand, and we need to keep the business incentived to honor that as a responsibility. It beats further curtailing their ability to serve the alcohol in the first place.
He didn't look drunk at all
I say this as a former lifeguard - the way he climbed that so quickly, walked across the roof, and swam to shore didn't look impaired in the least. I would bet that he planned his climbing route out in advance and went in cold sober or nearly so.
Again - features that indicate that one is not supposed to go on the roof or climb (lack of ladders, secured ladders, fences) make sense.
Turning bars into adult daycare centers just sends a message of lack of responsibility for oneself - that this is a place to get out of control.
really?
do you rotate through jobs every 2 weeks or something so that you can be a self-appointed expert on everything? Every topic, every day, you can guarantee a post by Swirly "oh well I used to do ____ so I basically know all there is to know about this topic"
get a life already!
Just old
... and entirely self-supporting since age 17. Unlike some people, I don't have a trust fund that allows me to sit my arse in a coffee shop and bemoan my unemployed state. I've done plenty of different jobs - including working class jobs you would turn your nose up at because it would ruin your manicure - when I've needed to.
Let me clarify
OK, this is where the phrase "get a life" really loses all meaning, when you're trying to use it against someone who consistently demonstrates a breadth of firsthand knowledge from a variety of life experiences. If your complaint is that Swirly knows about too many things, I think the phrase you want is, "get less of a life"!
the post
was meant to highlight the amount of flip-flopping and "need to comment on everything" present in the comments.
Next time, I will make sure to spell out my comments crystal clear so that those who don't understand sarcasm will be able to decipher them.
You've got up your standards
I can understand wanting to criticize Swirly for being a know-it-all and claiming experience in multiple lines of work. I've done it before. Many people here have.
But you really should shoot higher. 'No you can't tell he wasn't drunk' and 'nuh-uh you were not a lifeguard' are spectacularly unambitious criticisms.
Swirly's unbelievable career list would put her in competition with the Dos Equis dude, and she claims to have encyclopedic knowledge of medicine, stats, urban planning, and a dozen other fields.
So you zing her on something any enterprising rural teenager could accomplish?
Are you actually fake Swirly criticizing her own self in such an abysmally lame way that she makes herself look better? Or are you a real dude who just isn't very good at this?
As George W. Bush once said
"You forgot about
PolandPortland."You Forgot
Non-mechanical harvesting of berries, produce, and hazelnuts.
I have to understand medicine, urban planning, geography, demography and statistics - those are all part and parcel of I get paid to do for a living, toots.
On the way to that, many "non-career" moves were made.
If you watch the videos at
If you watch the videos at the top of the page, the same person is practicing jumping in at Pier 4 first. It seems he decided to do this before he ever entered the establishment. They might not have even sold him any alcohol before he jumped. The reason why there is video documentation is because this was all premeditated, possibly in a sober state.
Actually SwirlyGrrl
Deep breaths SwirlyGrrl, it's just me, O-FISH-L, not Sarah Palin or anybody to get enraged about. Actually I agree, in an ideal world adults would "be expected to act like adults and take full responsibility for their own behavior!" But this is the real world and they won't. So if the guy was seriously injured or killed, the virtually guaranteed lawsuit would likely focus on whether he was overserved, whether precautions were taken to prevent people from getting on the roof, the risk of someone jumping in the water was forseeable etc. Contrary to advocating more needless regulations, my suggestion was for the venues to figure things out (not the government) before someone gets seriously hurt or killed. Only if that's OK with you, my dear.
i applaud your pragmatism,
i applaud your pragmatism, but how else can the government make sure that the venues "figure things out" if not through more regulations? (I'm assuming that you would not support expanding the size of the government to allow them to check these places individually)
Pierce, bars are already being checked individually
Licensed premises are visited regularly not only by police, but also fire and inspectional services, among others, so no government expansion is needed. A simple "no trespassing" sign on the doors leading to the roof and on the roof itself would at least allow for a quick arrest of future jumpers. If these places don't make the roof more secure on their own, my guess is that their insurance carriers will require it, or a heavy increase in premiums.
Their roof is not the problem
It would be likely that the roof of the building next door was the most likely way he went up IF he was outside the bar when he started his parkour run. Check out google street view.
there seems to be a growing
there seems to be a growing interest in swimming in the harbor, and at the same time the city and state have gone to such great lengths to clean it to a point that can actually support that. Not to mention this wacky ICA diving thing which has many people I know buzzing with anticipation. It would be great to see the Seaport embrace an enlightened and innovative relationship to the water, to challenge and invigorate the idea of the harborwalk a bit. I know naysayers will instantly give you the litany of reasons why it can't be done, but some cities have begun to rethink the use of their post-industrial port areas in this way. I think of the amazing swimming alcove at the Port Forum in Barcelona, or Dania Park in Malmo as instant examples, and I'm sure there are many more. Especially with our significant tide change it could be a really great thing to seize on-- public tidal pools!
Urban Cliff Diving Is Real
Perhaps he was just practicing for the Red Bull Cliff Diving on August 20th from the top of the ICA(!)
I just saw a poster for it this morning.
OK
"the Bruins jump was not something the restaurant could have anticipated..."
Maybe they should have asked the previous owners, Massport police or the US coast Guard, on how many idiots jumped off the roof when it was the Seaport Bar & Grille.
Maybe the jumper was just trying to get away
from Atlantic Beer Garden's food. Maybe he has a violent allergy to Sysco Deep-Fried Everything.
Something totally lost in this discussion
Is it illegal to jump off of the roof of Atlantic Beer Garden into the harbor?
I'm not totally certain why it would be. If it isn't, then why is this before the Licensing Board?
Bingo
What crime was committed? If there was a crime committed, isn't it trespassing on the roof of the bar? Isn't it up to the bar to press charges?
Also, unless I'm missing something,
was the jumper actually in the bar before he climbed onto the roof?
If not, then it seems to me the Licensing Board is clearly overstepping their authority in this one.
He was not a customer, no
However, license holders are required to keep their property (and the area directly around their property, for example, the sidewalk) safe for customers and the general public. Some guy jumping off a roof could, presumably, pose a threat to the people below, so the question is how he got up on a restricted rooftop and what the restaurant is doing to keep it from happening again, I'm guessing.
Check out the google street and satellite views
The place has fences where ever there are low walls. I don't think these images are recent enough to include any post-dive modifications.
This guy probably had it all planned out ahead of time. He likely needed to parkour the next door building (which they have no control over) and then jump up on the beer garden from there, given the location of very tall walls and fences. If he was on the roof deck, he still would have had to climb from the lower to the upper roof ... but it sounds like he came from outside.
Blaming the bar for this is ridiculous. Making up things to create a violation where none exists in law is pure mind-boggling abuse of power and legal authority. The police and licensing board need to stop inventing laws as they go along and stretching existing laws like ultra spandex to bolster their pretenses of being in control. They are just making themselves look stupid, impotent, reactionary and pathetic.
Have you thought of a law career?
The restaurant's lawyer asked an even more basic question: Is there a law against jumping into the harbor, and if not, what was the violation?
Lt. Det. Eric Eversley, who was not at the scene, but reading from a report, thought about that for a moment and came up with creating a public disturbance. Sgt. Robert Mulvey, was did respond to the call, pointed to all the people urging the guy to do it again. Police often point to a gathered crowd as a proof somebody was creating a public nuisance.
The exact reason given in the citation was "unruly patron / hazardous condition. Patron jumped off roof into the water in violation of M.G.L. 138 s. 23 and 64."
138 s. 23 has nothing to do with jumping off a roof but with giving the board the authority to regulate and punish violators of state and local laws.
138 s. 64 deals a bit more specifically with punishments, but again, not with roof jumping.
Actually, yes
But it was more about patent law...and when I realized how boring that would be I decided to just stick to the science.
And, yeah, that's classic cop crap. Quote a citation number and write in the margins why you think the situation was illegal...even if you totally made up the fact that it's illegal.
The great part is, if it's just a ticket, suddenly the ticketed person has to convince a magistrate that the cop is wrong...the cop no longer has to prove that he knew what the hell he was quoting in the MGL any more. There's no onus for the cop to cite an MGL that you broke as long as whatever he writes in the margin sounds illegal.
What matters here is whether the bar had any hand in this. It's not like ABG offers catapult tosses into the harbor or a sign next to a ladder to the roof that says "we dare you to jump!". Does the board really think they wanted someone running across their roof and jumping into the harbor? It's just stupid...and still not illegal.
What a dive bar...
no text
Another Classy Boston Sports Fan
Go Yankees, Lakers, Jets and Canadiens...
- A Former Boston sports fan who is fed up with the trash and frat boys (adults).
What, no jockstrap jumpers?
Bah!
Jump off in a jockstrap and you've got gold.
C'mon now show a little imagination!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_XqcqzrZpE