Boston Fire Department Permits: Fill & Download for Free

I was just a little boy when the Vendome Hotel collapsed after a fire and killed nine firemen. One of my friend’s father was a fireman and he was there but uninjured. However, he was not able to get word to his family for hours after the incident and they were frantic.Some history.The Vendome was a state-of-the-art residence hotel built in 1872 by a man named Walcott. It was the first commercial building built on the filled land of Back Bay; it was a large, well appointed hotel and it was very successful from the start and even into the 1940s. It was the first commercial building in Boston to have electric light, the installation was supervised by Thomas Edison himself. It drew people from miles around to see the well lit building. At the time, the construction was considered superior - Boston was being extremely draconian for all construction on the filled land as they wanted to bring in rich WASPs and keep out the Irish and the Catholics. To this day, there are still no Catholic churches in Back Bay. As a result, very strict building codes were enforced in design and construction and tour of the area will show you the effect of those codes - stately streets and elegant design.After WW2, Boston fell into decline. No one wanted to live in the dirty, grimy city any longer and fled to the suburbs. Blockbusters, shills and General Motors further destroyed the city by ripping up the cheap subway and replacing it with dirty, noisy buses. As property values plummeted, landlords and speculators filled vacant apartments with anyone they could get, notably, large numbers of poor Blacks. In this way, White Flight accelerated and venerable areas like Franklin Park turned into ghettos and still are ghettos today. Morton Street, Selden Street, and others sent shudders down the back of police and commuters who have to travel there, especially after dark. All law and order ceases on Blue Hill Ave after 10PM, even todayThe Hotel Vendome became a victim of that decline and by 1960 the building as scheduled for demolition. While it lay, largely vacant, four separate fires were started inside over the years, probably by vagrants living in the building and using the large fireplaces in the formerly elegant rooms. The fires never took hold. In 1971 a real-estate consortium decided to rehab the building into a restaurant and apartments and reconstruction began. As a result of the reconstruction and poor inspection, some major shortcuts were taken that resulted in the weakening of the building. A fire broke out on June 17, 1972. The smoky fire was even on the news and as a child of 12 I remember seeing it on our black-and-white television. However, the Boston Fire Department, which in those days was far more dedicated and honorable than they are now, rapidly attacked the fire and put it out.Then, while the firemen were standing outside the building near the ladder truck, drinking coffee and putting away equipment, the building collapsed on top of them. Nine men were killed and it took considerable time to pull them out. My father and I went to the location later to watch the smashed ladder truck be towed out of the rubble. I remember, as a child, being surprised that the fire truck was largely white. As a child, I only believed fire engines were red. I don’t know why the ladder was white, but it was covered with bricks and damaged and they towed it away.Boston had burned down more than any city in the world, but Boston has a strange reluctance to acknowledge its’ fire history. There is no monument to the Great Fire of 1872, one of the worst fires in America and worse than the Chicage Fire that happened a month before. There is only a small plaque on Summer Street, easy to miss. There is no official monument to the Cocoanut Grove fire that killed 492 people in November, 1942 in the 2nd worst fire in US history (the worst was the 1908 Iroquois Theater Fire in Chicago). A group of private citizens put up a plaque on the sidewalk; the city (whose Mayor Tobin was taking bribes from the venue to get fast, illegal permits) has never acknowledged the fire; the Vendome Fire where nine firemen were killed took over twenty five years and all kinds of pushing to finally get a memorial on Commonwealth Ave across from the building. The city fought the monument tooth and nail.In 1982 it was discovered that the 2000 fires that occurred there over a period of three years, making Boston the “Arson Capital of the World” were largely the work of an arson ring led by the head of the State Police Arson Squad, a man named Furia. It included landlords and developers and insurance investigators and firebugs all looking to make money on fire. They even burned down the Fire Museum and all its artifacts were destroyed.The Vendome was saved and exists today in much beauty. It is sought after for its Victorian elements, it’s 11 foot ceilings and decorative (though non-working) fireplaces.Sadly, over the years, the Boston Fire Department has become a bloated, largely useless institution of fat, lazy “firemen” who are the highest paid in the country, do almost nothing and still take 100 percent of their sick days, the worst record in the United States. They are an embarrassment to the fire fighting profession. Every attempt at reform is battled back; their Union is almost as strong as the corrupt police Union (State Police Union Head Heads for Jail; Boston Police Union Head Charged with Multiple Counts of Child Rape and Molestation). They do nothing and get paid top dollar to do it.There are a couple of great books on this topic. You can read about it on Wikipedia, but much of the drama is lost. I suggest the book “Boston On Fire” by Stephanie Schorow. It’s uneven but contains and entire chapter on the Vendome investigation.

A lot of people are arguing that the looting and destruction of property that has been taking place in major cities over the course of the past week in protest of the killing of George Floyd can be compared to the Boston Tea Party and that this proves beyond a doubt that vandalism and destruction are effective means of protest.These people evidently must have learned about a different Boston Tea Party in school than I did, because, the way I see it, the Boston Tea Party is not at all something to be emulated; the motivations behind it weren’t nearly as noble as many people have been led to believe and, ultimately, all it did was escalate the conflict even further.The killing of George Floyd and popular response to itOn 25 May 2020, an employee at the Minneapolis deli Cup Foods suspected a black man named George Floyd of trying to purchase food with a counterfeit twenty dollar bill. There is currently no evidence to indicate that Floyd knew the bill was counterfeit, but the employee called the police on him nonetheless.Surveillance video from a nearby restaurant shows that Floyd was unarmed, handcuffed, and not visibly resisting arrest in any way. When Floyd fell on the ground, a white police officer named Derek Chauvin pinned him to the ground with his knee resting on Floyd’s neck and kept him there, even as Floyd told him that he couldn’t breath and told him that he was going to die.There were three other police officers who stood by as Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck. Multiple bystanders pointed out to the officers that Floyd wasn’t resisting arrest, that he was having troubles breathing, and that he would die if they kept doing what they were doing to him.Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for four whole minutes after Floyd passed out and became completely unconscious. He did not take his knee off Floyd’ neck until medical personnel were ready to load his body onto a stretcher. Medics on the scene found Floyd without a pulse. He was confirmed dead at the Hennepin County Medical Center.The entire incident was caught on camera by a bystander. Over the course of a few days, the bystander video of Floyd’s brutal killing spread online, resulting in widespread public outrage. Over the past week, protests have erupted all across the nation. The vast majority of protesters have been peaceful, but a small handful of them have engaged in acts of looting, vandalism, and arson. Numerous stores in cities all across the country have been ransacked and vandalized.There is some evidence that some of the vandalism and looting may be being done by white supremacists and police supporters in effort to discredit the movement for police reform, but that doesn’t change the fact that at least some protesters really are engaging in destructive actions.A few specific acts of destruction have attracted especially close attention. Notably, on the night of 28 May, protesters broke into the Minneapolis Police Department’s 3rd Precinct, ransacked the office, and set the building on fire. The fire spread rapidly, consuming the whole building as well as several buildings nearby. The fire department was not able to put out the fire because there were too many protesters for them to safely reach the buildings.ABOVE: Photograph from this article from Slate showing the Minneapolis Police Department’s 3rd Precinct engulfed in flames on the night of 28 May 2020ABOVE: Photograph from this article from Slate showing a liquor store engulfed in flames from the nearby 3rd Precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department on the night of 28 May 2020Reasons for the Boston Tea PartyNumerous people have compared the ongoing destructive protests to the Boston Tea Party, arguing that, just like the participants in the Boston Tea Party, the present-day rioters are standing up for their rights by destroying property of their oppressors. There are several serious problems with this analogy, however.First of all, although the methods may be similar, the motivations behind the present-day looting and vandalism and the Boston Tea Party could not be more different. In order to understand why the Boston Tea Party happened, we need to look at its historical context.In the 1760s, the British Parliament imposed a large number of taxes on the North American colonies through a series of acts known as the Townshend Acts. These taxes were massively unpopular with the colonists, so, in 1770, Parliament repealed most of them—except for the tax on tea. Colonists evaded paying this tax on tea by instead buying illegal, untaxed tea from smugglers, who bought it from the Dutch.In May 1773, however, Parliament passed the Tea Act, which allowed the British East India Company to import tea from China into the North American colonies without any taxes other than those imposed by the Townshend Acts and sell it directly to select vendors in major colonial cities, without any middlemen. This effectively allowed the British East India Company to sell its tea in the colonies at a much lower price than any of the smugglers selling illegal tea from the Dutch could afford.ABOVE: Portrait of Charles Townshend, the British politician who was responsible for promoting the Townshend Acts, after whom the acts receive their nameWord of the Tea Act reached the colonies in fall 1773. The colonists knew that this act would allow the East India Company to drive the smugglers who were selling illegal tea out of business, meaning colonists would be forced to buy tea from the East India Company. Because the tea sold by the East India Company was taxed by the British, though, buying the tea would represent a tacit acknowledgement on the part of the colonists that Parliament had the right to tax the colonies.In late November and early December 1773, three ships bearing a total of 342 barrels of East India Company tea arrived in Boston Harbor. The captains of the ships, realizing the tension in the city, unloaded all their cargo except the tea. They requested permission to return to England without unloading the tea or paying the tea import tax. Thomas Hutchinson, the Royal Governor of Massachusetts, however, insisted that the ships would not be permitted to leave until the captains had paid the import tax.The last day that the captain of the Dartmouth—the first of the three ships to arrive in Boston Harbor—had to pay the import tax before his cargo would be confiscated was 16 December 1773. Thus, on that day, a group of between one hundred and one hundred fifty men blackened their faces so that they would not be recognized and illegally boarded the three ships. Some of the men were also dressed as members of the Mohawk nation as a way of showing that they identified as Americans, not as British subjects.Over the course of three hours, the protesters dumped all of the tea into Boston Harbor. The tea they destroyed was worth around £9,000 (roughly $1.7 million in today’s money) and it represented an extraordinary loss for the East India Company.The participants in the Boston Tea Party were angry because Britain was providing the colonies with cheap, legal tea and thereby driving smugglers out of business; the reason why the George Floyd protesters are angry, on the other hand, is because, for years, police officers in the United States have been unjustly killing black people and these protesters feel like no one is doing anything to stop this from happening.There’s no question that the George Floyd protesters have more right to be angry than the participants in the Boston Tea Party did. On the other hand, the participants in the Boston Tea Party were actually attacking the property of the people they were mad at; whereas some of the recent protesters have been attacking random stores and restaurants that have nothing to do with police brutality.Here is an article from The Star Tribune with a detailed list of all the businesses that have been damaged in the protests of the past few weeks. The list includes two public libraries, a large number of stores, restaurants, and bars, and bunch of other places that can hardly be seen as responsible for the death of George Floyd or anyone else who has been killed by the police. (I mean, really, what does burning an Arby’s to the ground do to make the police start treating black people humanely?)ABOVE: Lithograph from 1846 by Nathaniel Currier showing the Boston Tea Party as he imagined itThe result of the Boston Tea partyFurthermore, even if we leave questions of motivation aside, the Boston Tea Party did not make anyone in Britain want to listen to the colonists’ demands. On the contrary, it had exactly the opposite effect; it shocked the British public, alienated people in Britain who would have had sympathy for the colonies otherwise, and unified Parliament in opposition to the colonies.In 1774, in direct response to the Boston Tea Party, the British Parliament passed a series of five acts that became known among the colonists as the “Intolerable Acts”:The Boston Port Act (royal assent 24 March 1774) closed Boston Harbor to all shipments from 1 June 1774 until all the tea that had been destroyed in the Boston Tea Party had been paid for.The Massachusetts Government Act (royal assent 20 May 1774) effectively abolished Massachusetts’s colonial charter, brought Massachusetts under direct British rule, and gave wide-ranging powers to the Royal Governor, allowing him to appoint nearly all public officials who had formerly been elected.The Impartial Administration of Justice Act (royal assent 20 May 1774) declared that any royal official accused of any capital crime would be tried in Britain rather than in the colonies. Colonists believed that this act would allow British officers to kill colonists with impunity.The Quartering Act of 1774 (royal assent 20 May 1774) gave royal commanders permission to lodge soldiers wherever they wanted, including even in private homes, and required civilians to provide for any soldiers who might lodge on their property.The Quebec Act (royal assent 22 June 1774) declared that French civil law and Roman Catholicism would be permitted to continue in Quebec, even though Quebec was now under British rule. It also expanded Quebec’s territory to include most of what is now the midwestern United States. Colonists believed that this act undermined colonial territorial claims in the Midwest and that it would allow the growth of “Papism” in North America.While the British Parliament felt that these acts were necessary in order to punish the colonists and maintain order, many colonists were outraged by them, seeing them as the actions of a distant and abusive government. The Intolerable Acts became fuel for growing revolutionary sentiments.The bottom line here is that the Boston Tea Party was a terrible idea and it did nothing but escalate a conflict that ultimately led to a bloody civil war that claimed tens of thousands of people’s lives. Unfortunately, it has become such an iconic event in our history books that we have all forgotten that all it did was make things worse.ABOVE: Engraving created in 1774 by Paul Revere portraying the British forcing tea down the throat of a native American woman—an allegory for the imposition of the so-called “Intolerable Acts” on the American coloniesWhy violent and destructive actions are especially a bad idea right nowEngaging in violent and destructive actions is an especially unwise decision right now, given the current political climate. Not only will violence and destruction distract from the very serious issue of police brutality and alienate people who otherwise would have been supportive, but it will also play right into the conservative media’s hands.As I mentioned above, most of the people who are currently protesting over the killing of George Floyd are not violent. Unfortunately, the media is giving much greater attention to the small minority of protesters who are engaging in destructive actions than to the ones who are not engaging in such actions. Media outlets in general are doing this partly because focusing on reports of violence and destruction is a good way for them to keep people paying attention and thereby improve their own ratings.Fox News and other conservative media outlets, however, are focusing on violent and destructive actions by protesters because they are trying to promote a very specific agenda; they are trying to portray all supporters of police reform as violent thugs and criminals who are simply opposed to law and order.This is not in any way an accurate portrayal, but we need to be wary that this is how they are trying to portray us and take conscious steps to avoid giving this portrayal any appearance of legitimacy. I completely understand why some people are looting and burning. After all, the problems of systemic racism and police brutality are deeply frustrating, even for me as a white person, and I’m sure they are even more frustrating for black people. The urge to protest by destroying things, though, is a trap that we must not fall for.ABOVE: Photograph of peaceful protesters from this article in The Kokomo Tribune. This is pretty much what most protests across the country look like; very few people are actually rioting and burning buildings.(NOTE: I have also published a version of this article on my website titled “The Boston Tea Party Was a Terrible Idea.” Here is the link to the version of the article on my website.)

Yes, kind of….In 1974, President Gerald Ford signed legislation that permitted the National Parks Service to purchase the area and turn it into a national park. Unfortunately, in order to do this, the government had claim eminent domain and take possession of the land from the locals. The idea was that they would raze the town and turn the area into a national park. Residents had to leave immediately, which to graffiti that read “Now we know how the Indians felt.” However, the government being the government, they didn’t really get around to knocking down all the structures, and many streets still contain rows and rows of abandoned homes with “No Trespassing” signs, seated next to the burned-out remains of homes that had been used in fire department exercises.In some paranormal circles, the area is called “Hell Town” or “Mutant Town,” but to everyone else, it is the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.By the way, there’s only one “documentary” on Boston, Ohio that I know about, and it might be the one you saw. If you check the IMDB website, you were learn its a fake documentary like “The Blair Witch Project” or that “Mermaids” documentary from Animal Planet.