re: Not trusting Eric Adams
Posted by: AlanScott 08:24 pm EDT 09/08/24
In reply to: re: Not trusting Eric Adams - PlayWiz 10:17 am EDT 09/07/24

I did a search just now on coney island concerts noise complaints and found several articles. It's a conundrum. It's sad when outdoor concerts that many people enjoy go away or move to a less-good venue. On the other hand, once a year I have to live with one day of blasting music from a street festival, and I hate it, and I dread it each year. (This street festival never used to have music, but then they started having live music, and they blast it.) And that's just one day. Where I live, it has gotten much noisier over the decades. Very little is done about, even though the general category that gets by far the greatest number of 311 complaints is noise, and this has been true ever since they started releasing the statistics. I'm a bit of an anti-noise activist, and I've done some research into the history of widespread noise complaints in New York. I think some people think that in the past, New Yorkers just put up with noise as a fact of life, and few people complained. That turns out not to be true. As long ago as 1907, the Times reported on Coney Island residents complaining about the noise of the Coney Island barkers. (If he hadn't died, perhaps an aging Billy Bigelow would have been one of the barkers.) Barkers were forbidden from using megaphones and were arrested if they did not comply. As long ago as 1929, in response to the huge number of noise complaints, the city health commissioner created a Noise Abatement Commission, which obviously had minimal long-lasting effectiveness. It’s also interesting that even as long ago as that it was understood that noise caused health problems.

Overall, I gotta say (by this point you won't be surprised) that I'm sympathetic to the complainers. Outdoor concerts in NYC should be far enough from residential areas and kept to a low enough volume levels as to cause minimal disturbance. Again, noise is a health issue. It causes stress that contributes to both mental and physical health problems, serious ones.

I'll get off my soapbox now. (Of course, I would never make a speech on a soapbox unless the soapbox was far enough from where people lived that I wouldn't disturb them.)
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