It was 6:00 A.M. on a balmy April day in 1964. The place was a six-block stretch of Manhattan's Sixth Avenue between Radio City Music Hall and Central Park, in the heart of New York City. Thousands of New Yorkers and transients slept in the cosmopolitan neighborhood of apartments, hotels, and schools.
Darkened windows of the apartment houses and the giant buildings owned by CBS, the J.C. Penney Co., and the Equitable Life Assurance Society looked down on a fever of activity in the street. "Slattery's Army" was moving into position, a position it was to hold for three years, from 1964 to 1967. It was a highly mechanized contractor's army, equipped with eighty-pound-class pneumatic paving-breakers, track-mounted high-impact rock drills, giant cranes and bulldozers. Its pneumatic tools were powered by a battery of five portable air compressors, each with a normal discharge pressure of one hundred pounds per square inch and a full-load speed of 1,750 rpm. The compressor engines were noisy, six-cylinder diesels of 900 cubic feet per minute (cfm) capacity.
Workers with scarred eardrums were preparing to launch an open-cut subway extension project for the New York City Transit Authority. As luck would have it, the Slattery Construction Company had chosen the southwest corner of Fifty-fifth Street and Sixth Avenue, just opposite the windows of my apartment, to assemble the five compressors.
We apartment-dwellers slept on, unaware that in a few minutes the life of our community would become both a waking and a sleeping nightmare.
The operating engineer started the battery of air compressors. Jackhammer and rock drill operators hunched forward, waiting for the compressed air to feed their vibrating pneumatic tools.
Suddenly, all hell broke loose. What someone later termed "a symphony of insanity" had begun. The overture to a three-year concert combined the sounds of air compressors, jackhammers, rock drills, chain saws, and dynamite blasts, with additional instrumentation by cement mixers, vibrators, cranes, and portable generators. All were unmuffied or inadequately muffled, through economy or through indifference and ignorance. And there was no practical escape from the din.
What happened to the residents of my neighborhood, as I was to learn, is already happening or will soon happen to millions of human and animal receivers of noise. The clatter of a jet or helicopter flight path; the incessant hum of a thruway; "temporary" construction sounds; the multi-level buzz of a dozen modern kitchen conveniences; conversations of neighbors in the next apartment; automated office equipment; the roar of an air conditioner; power lawn mowers, chain saws, and mechanized farm implements-you don't have to live near a subway project to suffer from noise. And nobody, especially in the United States, has any incentive to design for noise control.
It was no secret that upper Sixth Avenue was noisy. Three months after the start of the subway project, an acoustical engineer told a reporter that Manhattan was "the noisiest place in the country and probably the whole world," and upper Sixth Avenue was the worst area in the city.
From 7:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M., for a period of three years, my family and my neighbors dwelt in a noise environment far higher than that permitted at the property line of factories by New York's zoning code.
One's first reaction to a noise assault of this caliber is to believe, then just hope, then pray that the nagging noise will go away. But it continued. Daytime telephone conversation was possible only during the golden half-hour when the construction workers stopped for lunch. Office personnel were tormented by headaches and other noise-induced ailments, including short tempers. Many of us residents seemed to become absent-minded: neighbors reported taking showers without removing eyeglasses or articles of clothing. We couldn't converse in our own apartments without shouting. The vibrations made windows rattle, and floor vibrations were so pronounced that people wore shoes with ripple soles to counteract them.
Tranquilizers and aspirins were eaten like popcorn. I didn't mind taking sedatives, but I did hate to share them with my two-year-old, as prescribed by our pediatrician. My daughter was starting to talk at that time, and it seems to me her first comprehensible phrase was: "Noisy street, Daddy, stop the noisy street."
Home became a place to be avoided between the hours of 7:00 A.M. and 4:30 P.M. But many who lived in this area worked at home. We dreaded Monday mornings. Comfort became a remembrance of things past, replaced by sleeplessness, ringing in the ears, and headaches.
Doctors could only offer their patients tranquilizers and sympathy. Those with offices in the vicinity were themselves complaining, not only of the discomfort, but of the impossibility of using stethoscopes for diagnosis. A neighborhood drugstore made news because of its phenomenal sale of earplugs; another shop featured acoustic earmuffs in its windows. Down our block, where he was then recuperating from a heart attack (from which he was soon to die), Traffic Commissioner Henry Barnes vowed to take up the noise issue.
Billy Rose eventually stopped coming to his own Ziegfeld Theater office for the duration of the construction. He died before it ended. His staff, forced to remain behind, barricaded the windows with battens of sound-absorbing material, giving up their daylight. I boarded up several of my windows with the same material, not knowing then that it was no obstacle to sound.
The intense noise proved to be an economic as well as a personal blight. Hotels suffered diminished occupancy, with cancelled reservations and shortened stays. Sixth Avenue restaurants and specialty shops were hurt as office workers detoured to Fifth and Seventh Avenues. The Ziegfeld Theater lost bookings, and banks reported a noticeable decrease in business. Real estate rentals dropped. For-rent signs in midtown New York are normally as rare as dodo birds, especially in so convenient a location as upper Sixth Avenue, but now they blossomed in front of the luxury buildings lining the Avenue. Tenants broke leases and moved. One management reported a $7,000-a-month loss in rentals.
We did not get used to the agony of living with nagging, reverberating noise; indeed, we became super-sensitive to other noises.
Naively, I decided to take action.
First I complained to the neighborhood policeman. Patiently, he pulled out a collection of mimeographed notes. One dealt with noise complaints.
"Look!" he said. "There it is in black and white."
I looked. Construction noise from 7:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. was exempt from the anti-noise ordinance.
Well, I would appeal directly to the Transit Authority.
This bureaucratic dictatorship, I was to learn, was responsible to no one. The noise, I was flatly told, was the price of progress.
The price was too high. I decided to try the contractor. His representative told me in so many words (that I can't print) that the noise would remain as it was. The contractor told newspaper reporters that "Concentrating the compressors in one spot is the most humane way to handle the problem."
City Councilman (later Congressman and now New York State Supreme Court judge) Theodore Kupferman talked to the contractor, and was told: "Nothing will be done." The representative of the people was as helpless to control the noise as the people themselves.
I wrote to the Commissioner of Health, asking for a meeting. I received no reply, and went over his head to call one of the four doctors on the Board of Health, only to hear that the noise of construction at Bellevue Hospital was disturbing his work! Nevertheless, I demanded some attention. Persistence (and threat of a lawsuit) finally made the Health Department act-they passed the buck to the Police Department.
A police sergeant visited me at home, listened politely, and told me he would hear Slattery's side of the story. When I didn't hear from the Police Department within a reasonable time, I wrote to the Sanitary Inspection Division of the Health Department asking for a report. The reply referred me to the Deputy Police Commissioner in charge of community relations. I called that office and was told that it was merely a liaison with the Health Department. I was referred to the Chief Inspector's Office. I called that office and was referred to Patrol Headquarters, Manhattan South. After persistent inquiry, I was told that this project was classified as temporary and "emergency work" and that permits had been issued for necessary drilling, and so forth. (In other words, I had no grounds for complaint.)
And meanwhile the buck continued to be passed. The Transit Authority claimed it was following traditional construction industry practice in accepting the contractor's noise levels. The contractor said he was using the standard equipment available to him. The manufacturer of the air compressors said he was not responsible for the noisy engine that powered his compressors: he had to buy the components that were on the market. GM's Detroit Diesel, manufacturers of engines for compressors, told me it designed engines to meet the needs of the market, and no one was asking for quieter engines.
In April 1965 New York City Transit Authority engineers wrote to Councilman Kupferman that they, and the contractor, were "mindful of the sensitivity of people in this area and are doing whatever we can to reduce all noise to a minimum. Please be assured that we will maintain a continuing watch at this construction site to the end that all reasonable measures are taken to abate any public inconvenience which may arise." Such a good watch was kept that a 65-year-old woman fell to her death through an opening in the planking over the construction.
When Governor Rockefeller refused to intercede with the TA, I tried the Federal level. I asked the Division of Occupational Health of the United States Public Health Service if an official noise survey could be made. I was told: "At the present time the U.S. Public Health Service does not have funds available nor would it be possible for us to do this work unless it was requested by the City of New York." I asked also if the PHS had any recommended standards for community noise, and was told it had none.
I turned then to the private acoustic consultants, who either painted a picture of certain defeat in court or expressed disinterest in working for the noise victim. Their collective advice is embodied in the letter of one sympathetic expert:
1. Silence your apartment.
2. Induce contractor or Transit Authority to muffle.
3. Move out.