Saw this in Thursday’s Boston Globe:
From Samuel Adams’s calls for revolution in the 1700s, to Frederick Douglass’s antislavery orations of the following century, to Senator John F. Kerry’s concession in the 2004 presidential race, Boston’s Faneuil Hall is one of America’s most storied public stages.
But Murphy’s most recent proposal, to substantially raise the fees for renting out Faneuil Hall’s meeting space, brought rebuke from some fellow councilors yesterday who see the brick building with its famous grasshopper watching over the city as all-but-hallowed space.
“I think it should be free,” Councilor John Tobin said. “It’s a public building. It’s the people’s building, really.”
Murphy insists he’s not looking to turn the cradle of liberty into a cash cow.
He said it costs the city much more to maintain the building than it collects in rental fees, currently capped at $150 per hour for a minimum of four hours. Murphy’s proposed ordinance, which yesterday was referred to committee, would increase the maximum charge for renting the iconic building’s Great Hall to $500 an hour.
RUThinking what IMThinking? One hundred fifty an hour? Let’s see, eight hours equals twelve hundred dollars. It was built to hold sheep. Maybe we could bring ponies.
