It Is Not The Sounds Of The Neighborhood That Have Changed

The building demolition and construction industry can override all but the most powerful residents. Fees from these permits added more than twenty million dollars to city coffers. Yet inspectors sent to building sites did not carry noise meters and almost never issued fines. The city departments charged with enforcing noise ordinances failed to use clusters of complaints to identify chronic problems. A city cannot function, of course, without building and renovation, but when jackhammers and trucks obliterate any hope of productive work or restful sleep, the city has failed in its basic task of providing livable habitat for humans. Resistance comes from individuals, activist groups, and local elected officials. Individuals use small claims courts to enforce regulations that the city will not. These efforts build on a long history of attempts to reduce nuisance noises. In the first years of the twentieth century, physician and activist Julia Barnett Rice succeeded in limiting noise from boats and road traffic, especially around hospitals, and eventually won passage of federal noise control legislation. In 1935, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia declared October the month for noiseless nights, calling on New Yorkers’ spirit of cooperation, courtesy and neighborliness to reduce the clamor. Noise codes were enacted the next year. It often is the poor and the marginalized who experience the least control.

How Can I Stop?

Yet not all noise is bad and not all people experience the sounds of the city in the same way. In these differences are rooted bitter struggles over neighborhood identity and gentrification. When family and commercial life spills onto the street, as it does wherever homes are small and the summer is hot, the sound of voices, amplified music, and traffic becomes a defining feature of a sense of place, a signature of home. But the sonic meaning of home is contested. When different expectations collide, conflict ensues. Because sound flows in wood, glass, and masonry, squeezes through cracked windows, and wraps its waves around corners and over rooftops, the voices and activities of our neighbors live inside us, in the motions of fluid in our inner ears. Such intimacy can disturb sleep and intrude or infuriate during the day. Sound entrains us in the lives of others and we must therefore surrender to them some control over our sensory experience. This is true everywhere, of course, in a forest or on the ocean shore, but there we find our inner agitation mellowed, perhaps because the sounds come in the foreign tongues of trees, insects, birds, and water on sand. In a city, where we know the sources and meanings of sound all too well, neighbors can chafe or inflame our emotions, especially when we judge their noise to be a symptom of inconsideration. Predawn clatter of shoes on uncarpeted wood floors in the apartment above. Yet another shouted drama down the hallway.

Full Of Emptiness

Kids gunning fireworks at midnight from the street corner, for the tenth night running. A small dog with Olympian stamina, flaying the neighborhood with its yapping for an entire afternoon. In a neighborhood where bonds among neighbors are healthy, the flow of sound across the boundaries of one home to another is usually of little consequence. We tolerate and often enjoy the sounds of community. We resolve problems with a text message or neighborly talk the next day. But in neighborhoods riven by discord, sound can lead to further antagonism. One person’s joyful expression of local culture is, for others, a noise nuisance. Where these fracture lines fall along lines of race, class, and wealth, different expectations of what a neighborhood should sound like become both symptoms and causes of gentrification. At night, especially at the weekends, life on the street is centered around music played from amplifiers on small handcarts or from tinny cell phone speakers. The ebb and flow of passing rhythms and melodies is the primary accompaniment to the traffic sounds of the city. Around the Fourth of July, fireworks set off nightly from the middle of the street added explosive ornamentation to the music. The detonations echo and reverberate in the canyons between tall buildings, adding lingering muscle to the display.

Push Comes To Shove

As a white visitor to the neighborhood, I was a part of the process of gentrification, propping up housing prices and nudging retail toward whiteness. I enjoyed the music and felt no desire to call, but even if I had, as a guest and a cultural outsider, such an act would have been wrong. Other white residents in the neighborhood do not feel the same way. The same dynamic plays out in other cities, reflecting class and racial tensions particular to each place. At each place, it is not the sounds of the neighborhood that have changed but the desires and demands of listeners. Our judgments of what are appropriate and inappropriate levels of noise, and how we choose to act on these judgments, are therefore mediators in either tolerance or injustice. Housing prices drive gentrification but so, too, do cultural differences in sensory expression and expectation. City life also teaches us that noise is gendered. The city plans that directed traffic and industrial noise into Black and other minority neighborhoods were penned by men’s hands. The construction companies that push noise into the early morning and late night are run by men. The fireworks and car mufflers modified to sound like gunshots on the streets of New York are detonated mostly by young men. Men are the ones who sit with the car blaring its music to dozens of apartment windows or who strafe the narrow streets with motorbikes and cars retooled to maximize noise. City noise is often the sound of strident masculinity. Our culture encourages and tolerates men’s violation of the sensory boundaries of others but actively silences the voices of women. In every ecosystem, sound reveals fundamental energies and relationships. In the city, we hear human inequities of race, class, and gender. Responses to noise, too, are gendered. Women have led the effort to reduce urban noise for centuries, especially in New York City.