Sounds Wild and Broken, page 36
Parks, on the other hand, were disproportionately built close to wealthy neighborhoods. At the time of Prospect Park’s founding, in 1860, commissioners recommended seven park sites across Brooklyn. The city focused its attention on Prospect Park, despite the fact that it was remote from population centers at that time. Instead of providing the mass of people with easy access to green space, the park’s planners chose a site next to the estate of Edwin Clark Litchfield, a railroad and real estate developer. At its founding, one of the explicit goals of Prospect Park was to attract more wealthy residents to the area and raise property values and tax revenue. West Harlem, on the other hand, has been repeatedly disenfranchised from park access. When Robert Moses rebuilt the West Side of Manhattan from 1937 to 1941, he added more than 130 acres of green, relatively quiet parkland to the riverfront, but this largess ended at the border of the Black neighborhoods in Harlem. Moses’s projects were funded by every taxpayer in New York, but they benefited mostly whites, a form of robbery as well as exclusion. Later, in 1986, the city located the North River Sewage Treatment Plant on the riverfront in West Harlem, a billion-dollar project originally slated for construction farther south, closer to white neighborhoods. The plant exhales odorous and sometimes poisonous gases from sewage, along with fumes from the large engines that power the plant. In an attempt to offset some of these negative effects, a running track, pool, and other athletic facilities were built on the plant’s roof alongside the smokestacks. The plant sits adjacent to the now-closed Marine Transfer Station, a twenty-four-hour conveyance point for garbage trucks unloading their trash onto boats. Instead of the wide terraced green spaces leading from city streets toward the Hudson River enjoyed by New Yorkers living a few dozen blocks to the south, West Harlem residents access the narrow strip of riverfront via either narrow stairwells from the roof of the wastewater plant or down 120 open steps leading to a dark tunnel. The elevator from the roof was, during my time in the neighborhood, out of service. A footbridge that provided easier access burned in the 1950s and was not replaced until 2016. Not only is parkland in short supply here, but accessing it requires significant effort.
Sound pollution intersects other forms of environmental injustice in the city. Old diesel buses cloud the air with both noise and particulate pollution. Seventy-five percent of New York City’s bus depots are located in communities of color, neighborhoods that are also disproportionately affected by truck and car traffic, waste transfer facilities, and industrial sites. Latino and Black New Yorkers, on average, inhale nearly double the amount of vehicle particulate pollution than whites. In 2018, Eric Adams, Brooklyn borough president, joined by other elected officials, called the disproportionate use of old, polluting buses in low-income neighborhoods “unacceptable and intolerable.” The Metropolitan Transit Authority responded with a faster phaseout of some older buses and, by 2040, proposes to completely electrify the fleet. This would clear the air of bus noise and diesel exhaust but is contingent on funding. MTA’s budget is mostly controlled not by the city but by New York State, which has, for decades, siphoned funds away from mass transit in the city, including using MTA funds for bailouts of struggling ski resorts. The growl and spew of buses in low-income areas of New York City has its origin partly in the snowy pleasures of a few mostly white upstate vacationers, a potent example of the twentieth-century American project of gutting the city in favor of the suburbs and exurbs. A comprehensive scientific review in 2020 of the ecology of cities worldwide found that patterns of pollution, treeless heat islands, access to healthy waterways, and other environmental dimensions of city life were “principally governed” by social inequities and structural racism and classism.
More traffic noise. Less parkland quiet. The contrast between the soundscape in West Harlem and Park Slope is a result of more than 150 years of unjust city planning.
In New York City, the sonic manifestations of power inequalities sometimes also extend to wealthier neighborhoods. The building demolition and construction industry can override all but the most powerful residents. In 2018, the city granted sixty-seven thousand exceptions to the rule that building construction should take place only between 7:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m., more than double the number of permits in 2012. Each one of these exceptions took an already cacophonous process and expanded its disruption into the predawn and late-night hours. Fees from these permits added more than twenty million dollars to city coffers. Of the nearly three hundred million dollars spent on lobbying in New York State in 2019, real estate and construction account for the second-largest category, after lobbying for budget appropriations. The state comptroller’s office reported in 2016 that noise complaints about construction in the city more than doubled from 2010 to 2015. 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. The more upscale parts of the city may be quieter than other neighborhoods, but they are not immune to the sonic assaults resulting from the unequal influence of well-connected developers. 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. In West Harlem, a community-based nonprofit, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, has, for decades, fought for the rights and well-being of residents, winning settlements against the sewage plant, getting bus depots upgraded to be cleaner and quieter, fighting sources of asthma-inducing air pollution, and addressing the inequities of heat in urban areas. City Council members have lately pushed back at after-hours construction with bills that would, if enacted, more rigorously regulate noise. 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 1881, inventor Mary Walton, who lived near an infernally loud elevated rail line in Manhattan, patented noise-reducing supports for the rails, an innovation that was adopted in New York and other cities. 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. Horse-drawn milk delivery wagons in the early decades of the twentieth century were equipped with rubber wheels and the horses shod with rubber shoes to reduce clatter in the streets, an effort that seems charmingly quaint from the perspective of a city now ceilinged with helicopter and airplane noise and thrumming with construction. 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. Eighty-five years later, the targets of those codes read like a description of a contemporary street: amplified music, engines, construction, unloading of trucks, nighttime revelry, vehicle-mounted loudspeakers, and “prolonged and unreasonable blowing of a [motor] horn.”
Noise is one form of the lack of control over our sensory, social, and physical world. It often is the poor and the marginalized who experience the least control. 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. Sometimes these tensions are rooted in the inevitable frictions among neighbors living in close quarters. 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. If we heard in these sounds the droughted distress of the hissing pine needles, the lusty arrogance of the cicada, the clannish cursing of the crow, or the hurricane-born seethe of beach waves, might our minds add layers of judgment and analysis, complicating what was a soothing blanket? 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. Bass-and-drum-heavy music, played late at night: put your hand on the wall and feel its throb. Predawn clatter of shoes on uncarpeted wood floors in the apartment above. Yet another shouted drama down the hallway. 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.
The apartment where I stayed in West Harlem is in a neighborhood now mostly Latino. 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. 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. Had I dialed 311, the city government’s clearinghouse number, and complained about “the noise,” I would directly have called on the armed authority of the police to impose a culturally inappropriate preference on the local community. 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. As housing prices went up and whites moved in, noise complaints surged, especially after 2015. The decades-long practices of cranking up the radio while playing dominoes on folding tables on the sidewalk or kids setting off fireworks do not sit well with newly arrived white residents, many of whom are paying high rents in renovated or rebuilt apartment blocks.
The same dynamic plays out in other cities, reflecting class and racial tensions particular to each place. In New Orleans, white residents call the police to complain about Black second-line parades and street parties. New residential developments in Melbourne, Australia, elicit noise complaints from wealthier residents about long-standing live music venues, a fracture along lines of social class more than race. Near London’s Chapel Market, newcomers to renovated apartments complain about the shouts—“Three apples for a pound!”—and the early-morning clatter of barrow wheels. At each place, it is not the sounds of the neighborhood that have changed but the desires and demands of listeners. Perceptions of “noise,” weaponized through complaints to authority, serve to push out locals in favor of newcomers. In New York City, when a white hand dials 311 to complain about Black noise, the dialer does so with impunity (public records do not name the caller), and the subject of the complaint is exposed to an apparatus of law enforcement that is routinely violent and racist. 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 the roar of the city, then, we hear the same patriarchy that penned the biblical injunction “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection,” which caused Mary Ann Evans to publish under a man’s name (George Eliot); empowers contemporary mansplainers; allows a misogynistic president to tell women journalists to “keep your voice down”; keeps women out of orchestras and off the conductor’s podium; fills the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with more than 90 percent male voices; and, to this day, shushes young women and admires garrulous boys. 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. From Mary Walton’s nineteenth-century engineering; through Julia Barnett Rice’s work in the early twentieth century; to contemporary activism and policy making by WE ACT for Environmental Justice, co-founded and led by Peggy Shepard; and City Council legislation in New York City developed by council members Helen Rosenthal and Carlina Rivera, women have greatly improved the city’s soundscape. This continues the much older story of the role of female energies in shaping the sounds of the world. Evolutionary elaboration and diversification of sounds, from crickets to frogs to birds, have been driven, in many species, by the aesthetic choices of females. It was mother’s milk that gave mammals our muscular and nimble throats, and thus allowed humans to speak and sing. The sounds of our world are the product of all genders, but females have had a disproportionately large effect in producing much of what we admire and need in soundscapes. The diversity of animal voices, the beauty of vocal expression, and the sonic livability of the city owe much of their existence to the power of the feminine in biological evolution and human culture.
City noise also creates a hostile environment for those whose senses and nervous systems differ from the norm. Many restaurants are now so loud that anyone with even slight hearing loss is cut out of conversations, unable to discern patterns of speech amid the tumult. The noise in these places is like a high step at the front door, impassable to wheelchairs, but the barrier, in this case, is to those with ears that differ from the norm. Not only are these restaurants excluding many people, but they are also subjecting workers to ear-damaging noise levels on a daily basis.
Neurotypicals and those who live unburdened by anxiety disorders often thrive in the energies of noise. But clamor is often an unbearable assault to those on the autism spectrum or for those for whom anxiety is a constant companion. Noise can wall people out of participation in the life of the city, a barrier no less real for being invisible to the eye. A few who cannot abide the city’s clamor have the privilege of being able to escape, but every child born into this soundscape and every adult whose job or family binds them to the city is locked into distress and, sometimes, terror. Noise is, in some parts of the city, oppression of the minority by the majority.
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Stepping out of the subway station into Midtown Manhattan, I sometimes feel buoyed by the vigor of the sounds around me, lifted by the sonic convergence of human work and society. But the same soundscape sometimes shoves me into the early stages of panic, a vise of sound that squeezes my heart and breath, and fills me with a frantic and despairing desire to escape. The city is a window into my autonomic nervous system, the unconscious tuning of my body and senses. Sound reveals not only the dynamics of our society but the texture of our psyches. My varying responses to the city, then, are bodily symptoms of the city’s sonic paradoxes.
The city draws me deeper into my humanity. My connections to others expand amid the city’s confluence of cultures and its role as a hub for art and industry. I am fed by streets on which I hear dozens of languages, venues where both the leading edges and the canons of the world’s music come alive, and theaters where the power of the living, spoken word is celebrated. I am lifted by the sounds of urban birds manifesting life’s adaptability and resilience: a kestrel peppering Broadway with its cries, ravens palavering from Brooklyn rooftops, and night-herons croaking as they wing over Harlem. We are a convivial species with curious, empathetic minds. The human qualities of imagination, creativity, and collaborative action flourish in cities’ intensified social networks. I imagine that the inhabitants of the first cities in Mesopotamia felt the same surge of possibility. In this new urban habitat, we can paradoxically become more fully ourselves, a homecoming for the human species.
Yet the city also ensnares us in the worst qualities of our species. Inside the trap, the city talks over us, constantly, with such vigor that the chemistry of our blood and the tone of our nerves revolt, sometimes to the point of sickness and death. No wonder we feel the need to be loud, to assert our presence and agency. But in doing so, we become part of the sonic distress for others. The assault is all the more powerful for its union of the senses. In the din and heave of sound, the bile of traffic fumes pervades our noses and mouths. We feel it in our lungs too, the tightness and empty clutching at air after a walk down a street clogged with honking SUVs, delivery trucks, and cars. Some drivers lean on the horn and will not let up. Others blast in triplets or in stuttering phrases, anger sonified. Then an ambulance tries to pass, its wail impotent in the logjam of metal. The cloud of exhaust hangs in the street canyon. At night, only one or two stars are visible, the rest veiled by the dome of light, the aura of particulate pollution reflecting the energies of billions of electric lights. Underfoot, the ground is unrelentingly hard. Footfall here is always martial, strident, and clipped, unlike the varied sounds of shoes and feet outside the city as they pass over leaf litter, rock, gravel, sand, and moss. The city grasps every sensory nerve ending and says: You cannot escape me.
