City Approves Pinball Codes

The Cambridge City Council passed a city ordinance last Monday that would require pinball machine operators to have at least 500 square feet of space for each "automatic amusement machine."

The ordinance would effectively shut down the city's pinball arcades and restrict most restaurants and stores to one pinball machine.

"1001 Plays [a pinball arcade on Mass. Ave. between Harvard and Central Squares] would have to be relocated in Fenway Park to meet the footage requirement," Barry Rosenthal, an attorney for several Cambridge arcades, said yesterday.

Rosenthal promised a court fight in the issue. "You can expect 200 suits," one from each of the pinball operators in the city," he warned the council. Ralph Hoagland, owner of 1001 Plays, said later he would go to court to get the square footage provision struck down.

The council passed the ordinance, which also calls for attendants at sites with pinball machines and restricts the hours school children may use the machines, on a 7-1 vote. "If I had my way, I'd ban the damn things altogether--they serve no useful purpose," Cambridge Mayor Thomas W. Danehy told the council, councilors described pinball arcades as "public nuisances" and said that school children were skipping school to play pinball.

Rosenthal said the pinball industry could "live with the regulations if it weren't for the 500 foot restriction," which he termed unconstitutional. "There is no health or safety reason that you need 500 square feet for a pinball machine which is 15 square feet," he said.

He added that the footage requirements would also keep small store owners from operating more than one machine. "Tommy's Lunch, which has had pinball machine permits for 21 years, would be restricted to one machine under the new regulations," he said.

The new regulations may affect pinball machines in some of the University's Houses. University officials were unavailable for comment last week, however.

Russell Higley, a city lawyer who drafted the legislation, said the square footage restriction had "a good chance of being upheld in court. We knew it would be challenged, and we drafted it with an eye to that," Higley added.

Higley said that even if the footage restriction is struck down, a severability clause in the legislation would permit enforcement of other sections of the ordinance, which would ban licenses for pinball machines that would "increase the incidence of illegal or disruptive conduct in the area."

"Any judge in the Commonwealth will grant a restraining order" against enforcing the entire ordinance solely because of the footage provisions, Rosenthal said.

The council defeated two attempts to delete the footage requirement from the legislation, and one introduced by councilor Kevin Crane '72 to change the footage requirement to 250 feet. "That would have meant we needed Boston Garden instead of Fenway Park," Rosenthal said.

Councilor Lawrence Frisoli, who voted in favor of deleting the footage requirements told the council that it was "wasting the city's resources by buying a suit.