Results tagged “noise”

The saga on Jane Street continues, as neighbors unite against the Jane Hotel's nightlife crowd. Andrea Peyser pens a piece about the battle, pitting children with asthma ("every night, choking smoke fills the family's living space") against bold-faced party-goers like the Kate Winslet and Edward Norton. Yep, the modern-day Tiny Tim lives in a multi-million dollar Manhattan home with a backyard!

Yesterday Curbed quietly pointed out that the West Village residents were rallying against the Jane Hotel, particularly the establishment's plan for a rooftop bar. Rumor has it neighbors were promised entrance to the place if they would just STFU, but since late last month they've been airing their complaints on a blog called Nightmare on Jane Street.

Angry Tribeca residents gathered at a Community Board 1 meeting Wednesday to confront the owner of Sazon, a newish bi-level Latin Caribbean restaurant and lounge. The basement salsa parties have become quite popular, and that's upsetting some neighbors like Barbara Spitzer, who decried the "party atmosphere... Reade Street feels like I’m living on Seventh Avenue." Another resident complained, "People are coming here to have fun. Fun is good, but it’s not very good on a residential street." Then owner Genero Morales detected a whiff of racism against his largely Puerto Rican clientele, and that insinuation infuriated Spitzer: "You really shouldn’t go there. It’s really inappropriate, and it’s quite offensive." The protests come at a bad time for Sazon, which is still waiting for liquor license approval from the SLA and has been selling booze under temporary licenses. Tribeca Committee chairman Peter Braus agreed with the neighbors, and told Morales, "There’s a discrepancy, clearly, between how you represented yourself [in January] and how the community perceives you." Morales is taking steps to quiet down, but downtown community boards won't really be satisfied until all bars are relocated to a designated "fun barge" somewhere off the southeast tip of Staten Island.

The fiesta's not forever at Kensington Mexican restaurant El Gavilan, which has been driving neighbors up the wall ever since owners expanded it into a nightclub earlier this summer. Now there's dancing, music and sometimes fisticuffs! Derek Mayer, a resident who lives across the street, tells the Daily News he's been awoken at 3 a.m. with "20 drunk people congregating outside in the street." And in May he saw a knife-wielding man trying to slash a bouncer armed with a baseball bat. After some pressure from Councilman Bill de Blasio, the NYPD raided the place at the end of July, citing the owner for selling alcohol after hours, unlicensed sale of alcohol, operating an unlicensed dance hall, employing an unlicensed security guard and serving alcohol to minors. But the owner's brother insists El Gavilan is "not a discoteca. The people come, they listen to music from the machine. There's no live music." Live or not, the music's too damn loud, counters Albermarle Neighborhood Association President Larry Jayson. And don't even get him started on all the horn honking!

Lounge 47, a restaurant and bar with a capacious back yard on Vernon Blvd in Long Island City, has had a tough time making peace with some neighbors who say the noise and smoke from the patio is unbearable. Next door neighbor Beth Garrett and her husband have installed large signs on their property begging Lounge 47 patrons to pipe down, and a growing group of locals want the State Liquor Authority to revoke the liquor license, which was recently renewed. (The Garretts have also been accused of spraying their hose over the fence onto diners.) The current owner is now trying to sell the place, but the potential buyer wants to make sure he'll be able to transfer the liquor license.

Not surprising, but still troubling: A new study from the University of Washington and Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health shows that subways are the loudest forms of mass transit in the city. Some of the noise levels recorded in the subway exceeded 100 decibels, which is loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss for regular straphangers if they're exposed to it for even as little as two minutes a day. (The subway system's average decibel level was 80.4) Health expert Robyn Gershon tells NY1, "For a typical day, you should not exceed between 70 and 75 decibels across that 24 hours. Once you do, it accumulates time after time, year after year, and after a while, you will have hearing loss." The MTA says noise reduction has long been a concern, and their efforts to hush up include retro-fitting stations with noise absorbing barriers and quieting track noise with welded rail fasteners. But we'd be happy if they could just do something about the maddening train brake screeching at Union Square!

Honking horns, car alarms, noisy neighbors... it's all part of the urban white noise that keeps us awake. But what happens when nature encroaches upon our sonic space? The Daily News looks into the sex-crazed mockingbirds of NYC, whose mating calls are slowly driving locals insane. The population has gone up 10% in a year, not good news for those who describe the sound outside of their windows as "loud and shrill and grating."

We've got to admit, when we heard that residents near the Thomspon LES Hotel were vehemently complaining about the noise from the hotel's new rooftop patios, we wondered if maybe they weren't overreacting just a tiny bit, considering that they choose to live in a part of Manhattan not exactly known as an oasis of tranquility. But good grief, check out this recent Thompson LES pool party, documented by a neighbor who should be credited for shooting video, not bullets.

Over a dozen local residents who live (if you can call it that!) near the Thompson LES Hotel on Allen Street showed up at a Community Board 3 meeting last night to complain about traffic congestion, rowdy tools crowding their sidewalks, and noise noise NOISE echoing up into their windows from the newly-opened third floor rooftop pool bar. (Which, it should be noted, is open only to hotel guests—or anyone who gets a bite to eat at the hotel restaurant Shang!) How obstreperous are those bastards drinking and swimming and digesting Susur Lee's lamb chops? Well, one neighbor says their opening parties were so loud she couldn't hear her TV. Clearly, this monstrosity must be razed or urinated on at once.

While aggravated Brooklyn residents near McCarren Park have launched an organized campaign against the insipid jingles incessantly blaring from parked ice cream trucks, parents in other parts of the borough are taking aim at Mister Softee not for how he sounds but for what he sells to their children. Well, two parents anyway; a Bensonhurst mom tells the Daily News she takes her 7-year-old daugher to Seth Low Park for exercise, but an ice cream truck parked there is tearing her family apart: "I’ve had fights with my daughter in the past about it. You kind of feel like it’s pushed on you. It’s one thing if they’re just in the neighborhood, but to be here by contract [with the city], they might as well be selling drugs." (They've been known to do that too!)

It hasn't been open very long, but neighbors residing uncomfortably close to the new $100 million Cooper Square Hotel on the Bowery are already fed up with the noise reverberating from the hotel's various outdoor areas—which was only to be expected considering how many have bedroom windows facing the place. (Some just inches away from the outdoor bar!) To chronicle the escalating complaining, Vanishing New York has started a feature called "Notes from the Backside," and the first winning entry concerns one neighbor's pitched battle with the patio lounge: "About 2 a.m.a drunk woman came out to the patio and wondered at its beauty. I pulled out the megaphone and said in a store announcer kind of voice 'Attention Cooper Square Hotel douchebags: shut the hell up and get off the patio.' Didn't work. She said 'That makes my new york experience complete' and continued to yammer away. The hotel made a half-hearted effort to get her out of there." With warm weather finally here, we give it a week before neighbors go full Delicatessen on the noisemakers and unleash the bodily fluids.

      

In 2004 park officials retained landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates to design the new waterfront for Brooklyn Bridge Park. His solution to mute the traffic noise coming off the BQE was to erect a physical barrier between the roadway and the landscaped area, but some folks have declared that this current $7 million solution has numerous problems (most notably that it simply won't work).

Now that the maple syrup smell mystery is "solved", maybe Mayor Bloomberg's weird-stuff-in-NYC team needs to work on the odd case of the Staten Island Sound. A noise, described as a "loud," "heavy and low," and an "explosion," that occurred on Monday night is being investigated. The Staten Island Advance notes that its SILive.com commenters have no shortage of ideas, suggesting "everything from a mortar to a meteor to a sonic boom, to an exploding meth lab to, as authorities believe, one heck of a king-sized firecracker." A police source said, "As of now we have no idea. Nothing exploded in anyone's home or anything like that, and we checked all the power lines. ... We think it's probably fireworks." Like fireworks in NJ at a fireworks factory?

deserves to have their dreams invaded by the musical stylings of Foghat – but then the bad advice came rolling in: "While the noise is occurring, call 911." A second sage declared that late at night "is no time for you to worry about whether you're being inconsiderate by calling the authorities." That's the path that one local took when going up against Union Hall earlier this year (he lost), so using resources like 911 for complaints like that isn't always advised--hello, Reginald Peterson. Instead call 311 and try talking to the bar owner.

At last night's full Community Board Six Meeting in Borough Hall, passionate outcries were heard once again arguing over the motion to recommend against the renewal of Union Hall's liquor license. However, this time the loud voices were not coming from angry neighbors, but rather Board members themselves, speaking one after the next in favor of the Union Hall's continued presence in Park Slope. The CB6 not only rejected the motion put forth last week by Board member (and Brazen Head bar owner) Lou Sones, but overwhelmingly passed a new motion to take an official stance supporting Union Hall's liquor license renewal when it comes up before the SLA on May 31st.

Before the big meeting tomorrow at Borough Hall, the Brooklyn Paper weighs in on the great Union Hall debate of Aught Eight. Recently some neighbors, led by Jon Crow, rallied together to stop the renewal of the establishment's liquor license at the end of the month; one neighbor, who has since moved, told us, "This place had a serious impact on my life, on my wife's health, and threatened the health and well-being of my child. No one's fun is worth that, to me."

Speed Racer, from the mysterious sibling filmmakers behind the Matrix trilogy, is opening to well-deserved critical derision. It’s a 135-minute insipid, soulless commodity that lifts some of the Japanese original’s storyline but absolutely none of the charm. The movie opens with a 34% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes; perhaps J. Hoberman’s pan gets it best: “Ideologically anti-corporate, previous Wachowski productions aspired to be something more than mind-less sensation; Speed Racer is thrilled to be less. It's the delusions minus the grandeur.”

Late last month some residents of Park Slope secured themselves a Community Board meeting with CB6 to air their complaints about Union Hall, and attempt to stop their liquor license from getting renewed. The meeting took place last night, lasted more than two hours, and to everyone's surprise -- the board voted against Union Hall. The vote of six to two (with two abstentions) means CB6 will advise the State Liquor Authority (SLA) against renewing the liquor license of Union Hall.

As if Brooklyn music venues aren't suffering enough right now, residents are currently rising up against what they call a "nuisance bar" in Park Slope. That bar is Union Hall. Jon Crow, one of those spearheading the campaign to shut the venue down, emailed us about an upcoming public hearing regarding the renewal of Union Hall's liquor license, admitting, "those of us fighting this nuisance bar are fully aware this hearing won't close it down."

The rowdy drunken yahoos stumbling out of nightclubs on the Lower East Side and East Village have some residents nostalgic for the old days of pre-gentrified lawlessness. 47-year-old Frances Ayers, who lives at Rivington and Ludlow streets, tells the Post, "At least with the drug dealers there wasn't any noise." Since July 2007, when the city’s stricter noise code went into effect, complaints recorded by local community boards have boomed.

Earlier this year, the city's new noise code went into effect, and the city has definitely been enforcing it on Staten Island's Kinborn Street. The Department of Environmental Protection has fined Lucie Liebman $1,000 for a noisy ice truck jingle. The thing is, Liebman doesn't have an ice cream truck! A Lickety Split truck had parked outside Liebman's house and sounded its jingle. The DEP sent two summonses to Liebman, before dropping off the hefty...