I live in New York, which may not be the loudest city in the world (word has it that Delhi, Beijing, and Ciudad de Mexico are even more cacophonous), but certainly must rank among the top ten. My wife and I live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, in a back apartment above a courtyard; ours is one of three six-story buildings erected in 1900. The complex was once called Ivy Court, because in the early 20th century, when it was the place’s main entrance, its walls were covered with vines, like the halls of prestigious universities. The name persists in the title of our Tenants’ Association, although the ivy died long ago, the court was sealed off, and the doors to the three buildings now face West 107th Street.
By now, the interior space between West 107th and West 106th Streets has been neglected for so long that gangly weed trees have grown through the crumbling concrete paving and now stand higher than the fifth floor windows of my apartment. I delight in the trees’ scrappy proof that nature will always find a way of thumbing her nose at human artifice, but there’s a down side to the copse in the courtyard. To some tenants of the ground floor apartments – the twenty-something yuppies and urban hipsters who began moving in because the rents were cheaper than those in the East Village, Chelsea, or even Brooklyn) – access to what they assumed was their own private park prompted them to party hearty every evening after they got home from work.
Things came to a head around 2008, when they took a boom-box and a keg outside and began to play Beer Pong, hooting and hollering as they fired ping-pong balls from a loud pop-gun, trying to land them in beer cups set up some distance away. There was an anti-noise ordinance in the city with a number to call, but no one ever answered it. I took to yelling out the window at them, threatening to call the cops if they didn’t shut up, even though I suspected my threat was empty; at the time the NYPD was too busy busting Latino and black kids for one reason or another (seldom good), over on Amsterdam Avenue to hassle white boys and girls who posed no real or imagined threat to anything except their neighbors’ eardrums.
I never found out how the drunken assholes made a living, but from their lack of concern for anyone outside their little circle, I assumed they were either junior corporate maggots, fledgling banksters, or self-infatuated tech dorks from Silicon Alley, as the computer industry’s New York outpost is called. Whatever the case, late one summer night, desperate, I called the local police precinct directly, and a cop picked up on the second ring. I identified myself, gave her my address and phone number, and registered my complaint. Not ten minutes later the party shut down. Since then, there have been no more late-night courtyard revels, for a mercy.
Partying neighbors are hardly the only source of noise pollution in New York, to be sure, nor the most maddening. There’s “the roaring traffic’s boom,” in Cole Porter’s words, a continuous succession of honks, wails, and blares, as taxis, private cars, ambulances, and fire engines blast through the streets. Garbage trucks get busy at five ayem, their compactors loudly munching up the trash the crews collect from sidewalk cans and toss into their maws. The trucks generally block the street, so early-rising motorists who can’t get past them lean on their horns. The sanitation workers ignore them, of course, and their trucks emit piercing beeps to warn other drivers each time they stop to empty more bins.
The alarms of parked cars squall, whoop, and beep every now and again at night: rowdy teenagers have discovered they can set the devices off by rocking the bumpers of the cars. Nobody pays the slightest attention to the alarms, and they finally stop of their own accord, either because of built-in timers, or because the cars’ batteries have gone dead.
Our sector of Manhattan is on the approach and departure flight paths to and from LaGuardia and Kennedy airports, and the jets whine in and roar out regularly. Police and news helicopters clatter and whop over our building several times a day. Until recently, copters for tourists offered sight-seeing trips that flew directly over the city. But in a rare victory for peace and quiet, neighborhood associations banded together to sue the company that owned the chopper outfit, and won. Now the tourists travel through my neighborhood on double-decker buses, which is some improvement. However, the buses block already congested avenues, which means more angry honking from frustrated drivers
Getting back to my building, for a number of years what seems to be a small industrial facility has been operating somewhere at the eastern end of the courtyard. I have no idea what the workers are making, but its manufacture involves ripsaws, routers, sanders, nail guns, and other weapons of mass construction, along with simpler tools like sledge hammers, which are used to pound heavily on sheets of metal and wood, to what end, only their wielders know. This neighborhood isn’t zoned for light industry, and I’ve tried, without success, to find the facility. Because it’s channeled through a maze of building walls, sound bounces around confusingly here, and the din may actually be coming from another block.
Makes no difference; I’ve reached the age at which I crave a short nap after lunch to perk me up for the rest of the day, and the pounding and ripping and banging is at its peak in the early afternoon. I know I have no right to complain about hard-working people trying to make a living, so when I want to conk out for a half-hour or so, I shut my bedroom window and bury my ears in my pillows. But my dreams often involve slaughtering the workers with their own tools.
In summer there are street festivals on Amsterdam Avenue that feature Dominican or Puerto Rican salsa music, usually recorded, but sometimes live. I like salsa if it’s well performed, but too often the live performances star women who scream off-key at the top of their lungs, substituting enthusiam for talent. And even when the music is pitch-perfect, it’s played at deafening volume, with drum-beats you can feel from the soles of your feet to the top of your head. Because of the sonic bounce effect I mentioned, the drums thump right through the window beside my desk, so I have to wear earplugs to get any work done.
A few years ago, our landlord began an effort to recruit Columbia University students as tenants, and even renamed the Ivy Court complex “SoCo,” a ripoff of artsy SoHo, because the place is a few blocks south of the university. He wasn’t content to wait until tenants under rent-stabilization moved out or died, but tried to evict us, by fair means or foul. He offered us ridiculously low amounts of money if we would give up our leases, and when that didn’t work, he tried to scam us by slipping weasel phrases into our renewal contracts that would have obligated us to leave within a time period shorter than the one the leases themselves guaranteed. Fortunately, the Ivy Court Tenants Association consulted a lawyer (paid for by our monthly dues) who assured us that the ruse was illegal, and reminded the sleazebag of the fact.
So he abandon that effort, but there was nothing stopping him from proceeding with the reconfiguration of every apartment that fell legally vacant. On our floor, he began converting one and two bedroom apartments into rabbit-hutches into which he could cram as many people as possible, each of whom would be paying market rate, which in our neighborhood runs to around five thousand bucks a month. He hired non-union, unskilled Chinese workers, and the racket they made was appalling as they went about their oafish labors. They smashed through walls with sledge hammers, used saber saws to cut new door openings along our corridor, and at one point they almost caved in my kitchen wall before I went out and screamed at them to stop. They nodded and smiled with utter incomprehension, and went on bashing.
The scumlord, however, had hired a slick building manager to deal with tenant complaints. He had an office in the complex, and he answered his phone when I called. Apologizing (perhaps because he knew his boss was already under indictment for illegal tenant evictions in other properties he owned in the New York area), he promised to have a word with the crew. Whatever he told them worked: my wall survived. But the noise went on in the building’s other vacant apartments, and I went through another set of earplugs.
My wife and I are fortunate enough to own a small house in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and we spend some weekends and vacations there. It’s a long, slow drive, because of sporadic lane closures due to road work (more honking), but we listen to books on tape and try to possess our souls in patience, anticipating blessed peace and quiet at the end of the journey.
However, our house is on a state highway, and although it’s set well back from the road, there are times when the driveway isn’t long enough to mitigate the noise from passing vehicles, or the racket caused by certain of our neighbors. We have a screened-in front porch, and I sit out there in all weathers because I’m addicted to cigarettes, and I try to keep second-hand smoke away from my wife and any non-smoker who happens to be visiting. After winter storms, the snow-clearing trucks rumble past, the bottom edges of their plows screeching hideously against the road surface. Tractor-trailers gear down as they decelerate, sounding like giants with smokers’ coughs.
And as soon as the weather warms up, it’s motorcycle season. Long processions of Harleys rev past our house, driven by fat, bearded middle-aged guys wearing bandanas over their gray hair and denim jackets with cut-off sleeves sporting the logos of their cycle clubs on their backs. The cycles aren’t bare-frame choppers, like those the original Hells’ Angels rode. They’re all pimped out with long, wide saddles and built-in luggage panniers, and some of them even have side-cars, in case the bikers’ equally hefty mamas feel cramped sitting in the buddy seat. The bikes are the size of small sedans, and they’re louder than the semis, but instead of coughing, they fart. Thunderously. Harleys aren’t build for speed and efficiency, like Japanese or Italian motorcycles (though a Honda or a Ducati, going past our house at eighty-five miles an hour emits a demonic shriek that can curdle your blood). But Harley “hogs” seem deliberately engineered to make an intimidating racket, warning everyone that their riders are bad dudes. Patriotic ones, though, you betcha: many of the bikers’ bandanas are miniature American flags. Talk about wrapping yourself in Old Glory!
Some car-drivers feel they have to share the rap and hip-hop they play at top volume on their radios, so they keep their windows wide open as they barrel along our road, so that nobody will miss a single beat None of these drivers are black – there are very few African Americans in the Peterborough area – but after Eminem co-opted rap, his fellow white folks decided it was cool. Same old story: black people invent a musical form for themselves – jazz, for example – and white people make a fortune playing it for white audiences. But rap isn’t even music, just rhythmic snarling to synthetic drum-beats.
In spring and summer our neighbors up and down the road are out with their gas-burning mowers and edgers, preserving Lawn Order as dutifully as the police maintain the phrase’s near-synonym. Late autumn is the time for getting in firewood, so out come the chain-saws. It’s also when all the trees shed the gorgeous foliage that attracts leaf-peepers to New Hampshire, which means that the sound of leaf-blowers is heard in the land, deafeningly.
And fall marks the start of hunting season, so the guy two houses down from us starts sighting in his arsenal of guns, firing out of his back yard into the woods we share. The Bambis don’t stand a chance against him: he’s got an AR-15, a modified military weapon with a fifteen-round magazine he rips through as fast as he can pull the trigger. He also has a shotgun, for blasting migrating ducks and geese out of the sky, and, by the sound of it, a high-caliber pistol, perhaps to defend his home against intruders, or, if Hillary Clinton wins the current presidential election and pushes through comprehensive gun reform, an assault by federal agents in black helicopters, bent on repealing the Second Amendment.
Of course there are Fourth of July fireworks in our patriotic town, and although my Army service during the Vietnam War era cured me of empty patriotism, I do enjoy the amazing displays put on by crews from the same New Hampshire pyrotechnics company that supplies Boston’s and New York’s annual observations of the birth of our nation. The fireworks go off on the football field of Peterborough’s Conval High School, and our friends down the road, whose back yard offers a view of the field, have often invited us to dinner and set out lawn chairs so that we can watch the whiz-bangs and skyrockets in comfort.
However, a good many people in our area start setting off firecrackers as loud as gunshots several days before the Glorious Fourth, and continue to explode them for several more after the holiday. There’s no feeling quite as awful as being jolted awake at one in the morning by what sounds like the outbreak of a war.
Crime is hardly unknown in bucolic New Hampshire. Fires break out, people fall ill or get hurt. So police, fire engine, and ambulance sirens occasionally howl along our road. I can’t complain about those necessary noises, even if they make me worry about who the cops are after, who’s sick, and where the fire is.
But most of the time Peterborough is much quieter than New York or any big city. So when its peace is suddenly and violently disturbed, the effect is more jarring than the constant racket of New York. I’ve adapted to that, taking measures to mute it or tune it out altogether. But being jolted out of rural quietude by sirens, gunfire, raucous music, or a procession of meatballs on motorcycles, makes my heart lurch with fear and anger, which isn’t good for the poor old pump.
Still, the woods around our cabin are beautiful in all seasons, especially in autumn, my favorite season. And the human noise is, after all, only sporadic. There are more interludes of blessed silence than intrusions of racket. So I will try to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, as Johnny Mercer wrote. It’s a lovely October morning as I sit on the porch finishing my notes for this essay, and all is peaceful – or would be if that goddamn blue jay in the hemlock tree would shut up.