Thursday, February 19, 2009

IC sign turns heads

Alerted by Tom Salemi's post about the P. Preservationist site, I checked it out.

In doing so, I noticed a little blurb at the top of the page about the new sign outside the Immaculate Conception Church, on the corner of Green and High streets.

I had been alerted to this sign, and a general negative reaction to it, a couple of weeks ago. I would go take a photo, but I'm just still too sick.

Let's just say it's rather large and I gather that it lights up at night. I'm really kind of surprised that it's the direction the IC church chose, seeing as how it's ... not in keeping with ... the neighborhood? Good taste? You decide.

I gather that the sign falls under the Dover Amendment, since I can't imagine that it would have been allowed otherwise:

The "Dover Amendment" is the common name for Massachusetts General Law (MGL) Chapter 40A, Section 3, which exempts agricultural, religious, and educational corporations from many zoning restrictions. It allows a facility that provides certain services, educational chief among them, to ignore local zoning laws and build the facility it needs to provide those services. The Dover Amendment has allowed many developers to build facilities that were substantially larger than zoning laws would ordinarily allow or which were inappropriate for the neighborhood. (source: Stepps)


I couldn't find anyone who was willing to criticize it "on the record," so I didn't write it up for the Current.

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