Mayor Thomas M. Menino, tear up those plans for a new City Hall. That is if you can still find the cocktail napkin you scribbled them down on two years ago.

It’s a line that may sound a bit odd coming from me. After all, I championed the idea of demolishing the Berlin bunker that now passes as the Hub’s civic headquarters in a column for the Boston Herald back in the fall of 2006.

The commercial real estate boom was still roaring and the city, in my view, was sitting on a real estate gold mine in an up-and-coming section of downtown. The city should sell off that hideous concrete pile and the land underneath and be done with it, I argued, noting there were more than a few developers ready to take up the challenge.

I had the good luck of then watching the mayor, about a month or so later, proposing something like that in a speech to downtown business executives. However, the mayor gave the idea a significant, and now in hindsight, fatal twist. The sale of the City Hall would finance the construction of a new municipal palace on the South Boston waterfront.

Two years later, there’s been a lot of smoke and mirrors, but no formal proposal, not even a rendering. Yes, it takes a lot of time to get projects built in Boston, but this is ridiculous.

It’s time to call a spade a spade, a turkey a turkey, or however you want to phrase it, and pull the plug on this idea altogether. The roaring real estate market that would have supported such a grand scheme is six feet under. And the last thing hard-pressed city taxpayers need now is the expense of paying for useless consultant reports on a project that looks like it has as much chance of getting built as John McCain had of becoming president.

When I called the mayor’s spokespeople for a response, I was greeted with silence. That’s an improvement over the previous party line that everything is just fine and that you just aren’t seeing all the wonderful work going on behind the scenes.

I’m not buying it anymore, nor is anyone else. This may not be the private sector, but even in government you have to show some results for people to take a project seriously.

But for anyone out there beyond the fifth floor of City Hall who still believes plans for a new City Hall are alive and kicking, let me spell out exactly why this is one idea whose time has come and gone.

Back when I wrote that Herald column, the real estate development world was awash with billions in capital looking for a deal, any deal, to latch onto. Those were the days of unbelievably easy credit. And developers like downtown tower builder Dean Stratouly were salivating at the opportunity to snap up what would be the last major downtown development tract. And there was even the appetite to incorporate a new, modern city government complex somewhere on the site.

There was maybe $200 million, or more, sitting on the table, there for the taking.

But the days of such speculative land deals are long gone. In fact, it’s anyone’s guess whether any of the new towers proposed for the city’s skyline will get built now. John Hynes, one of the more successful developers Boston has ever seen, is struggling to get a construction loan for his redevelopment of the Filene’s block.

So you do the math, but there’s no way, at least in the next five years and maybe for the next decade, that anyone is going to be able to offer big money for City Hall and the valuable downtown land it is perched upon. And that presents a fatal problem for the mayor’s plans. While it got overshadowed by the debate over the merits of building a new city headquarters on a remote and windswept stretch of waterfront, the sale of the old City Hall was supposed to have paid for the new one.

Anyone think that is going to happen now?

To me, there was a huge missed opportunity here. The idea at its core had the makings of a home run. Sell off an eyesore and make a bundle for city coffers. No need to agonize over where the new city complex would go. The deal could have included a new, modern and scaled down municipal headquarters on the same site. With the ability to conduct much basis business on-line, there would be no need for another, 1960s-era concrete hulk.

Instead, the mayor’s proposal played up an idea few if anyone who isn’t on the public payroll could care less about, replacing one monolithic monument to city government with another, this one albeit with marginally better views. The mayor may very well have hoped to use the project to further spur development on South Boston’s waterfront. Instead, the relatively remote and hard to reach location immediately deluged the proposal in controversy.

And it’s been downhill ever since.