NEW YORK — No wonder they call New York the city that never sleeps. Who can get any shut-eye with all the noise?
Subway trains, honking cars, roaring planes, barking dogs and boisterous people make noise the Big Apple’s No. 1 quality-of-life complaint. A city hotline got more than 260,000 noise complaints last year.
Silence, it seems, is the one thing in this city of more than 8 million that’s almost impossible to find, despite a major crackdown on excessive noise.
One of the lesser-known legacies of the recently ended 12-year tenure of Mayor Michael Bloomberg was one of the nation’s toughest noise codes. Under it, every construction site must post a noise mitigation plan, while excessive noise from restaurants, sidewalks, even garbage trucks is illegal.
Tickets range from $70 for a barking dog to $350 for honking your horn to as much as $8,000 for a nightclub playing loud music.
But despite thousands of violation notices filed with the city last year, health officials warn there are still plenty of places where decibels top 85, a level that can cause hearing damage with prolonged exposure. Some parts of the city frequently exceed 100 decibels — especially where planes swoop a few hundred feet over rooftops.
“This is the noisiest place in New York City!” said Jesse Davis, 57, who stands in the heart of Times Square handing out leaflets for psychic readings. “It’s toot, toot, toot, toot all day.”
For two decades, Davis has done this kind of work, handing out promotional materials for businesses, surrounded by a sea of cabs, cars and trucks, their drivers often laying on the horn to get pedestrians to move.
“This is New York, and this whole city is noisy,” he says. “But you get used to it — business is business.”
At P.S. 85 in Queens’ Astoria neighborhood, children and their teachers have a signal system: Touching a forefinger to the lips while lifting two fingers in the air.
That means stop everything because the overwhelming noise outside from the screeching elevated subway trains drowns out any kind of speech.
“It’s really loud, and our teacher has to stop every two minutes, or three, when the train comes,” said Nepheli Motamed, 8, whose third-grade classroom is at the mercy of the trains.
Parents recently held a news conference to protest the noise, and they were interrupted 16 times in a half-hour by train squeals.
