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Prologue to Decibels

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 unmuffled 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.

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It finally struck me that if anything were to be done about noise, the noise receiver himself would have to do it. There was no “George” protecting the public from excessive noise–not on any level of government.

In Europe, I learned, citizens had organized to fight noise so effectively that the struggle had already gone beyond national boundaries. The national organizations were cooperating as the International Association Against Noise (known by its French initials, AICB). This heartening news led to my joining the British Noise Abatement Society. John Connell, its founder and chairman, taught me the first principle of noise abatement: fight with knowledge and strength. With his encouragement, I decided to form a neighborhood noise abatement organization as a first step toward a sane acoustic environment.

I sent out a call for a neighborhood meeting, and on a hot, muggy night in May 1965, a hundred people showed up. I had invited city councilmen and district leaders of both major parties, as well as the Borough President of Manhattan. Councilman Kupferman attended, and the Borough President sent a representative.

A steering committee was appointed, consisting of two lawyers, a civil engineer, an engineering magazine editor, and myself as chairman. We christened the organization the Upper Sixth Avenue Noise Abatement Association (USANAA). There would be no dues, and we would operate as an informal association of neighbors.

After a thorough exploration, the idea of a lawsuit was discarded as being too costly and unlikely to bring any relief. Instead, I was authorized to continue my attempts to draw attention to the problem and to learn all I could about noise abatement.

It is easier to gain an audience with the Pope than it is to meet with a transportation agency commissar. Determined to present to the Transit Authority a bundle of petitions USANAA had gathered, I sought a meeting with one of the TA’s three commissioners.

And so it happened that one morning, July 16, 1965, more than a year after the subway project uprooted our lives, attorney Ralph Brazen, plus a representative of one of the blighted apartment buildings, and myself found ourselves in the TA’s inner sanctum, face to face with Commissioner Dan Scannell, Chief Engineer Nathan Brodkin, several lesser engineers, and the contractor’s foreman. From the very beginning we were put on the defensive. There was not one iota of acknowledgment that we had a legitimate grievance and that something should be done to lessen the noise. The TA tried to make it seem that I was the troublemaker, the only one who was stirring up a fuss. The two responsible citizens with me, and the petitions containing 400 signatures, were conveniently ignored.

The TA officials proved to be ignorant of industrial safety codes, ignorant of the basic principles of noise measurement and control, and totally indifferent to our discomfort.

For every point we raised, the Transit Authority had a rebuttal.

When the real estate representative reported extensive losses from leases cancelled and unrenewed because of the excessive noise, the Chief Engineer tiredly answered, “These tenants are not disturbed by the noise. They don’t like the horrible appearance of the torn-up street. Anyway, if they don’t like it, let them move.” This, to a real estate man whose complaint was that the tenants were moving!

Commissioner Scannell had little to say, except that he believed the noise problem was caused by traffic.

When we placed in evidence brochures and other indications of advances in construction-noise silencing in England, to name just one country, the Chief Engineer answered that England was a socialist country, and that the English and the Europeans in general built more slowly than we did. When I persisted with data on silenced equipment and techniques available in the United States, he sucked in his breath and delivered what he must have thought was the coup de grace: “Do you, Mr. Baron, by demanding quieter subway construction, wish to jeopardize the fifteen-cent fare?” Then, turning to his staff, he sighed, “Ah, I can hardly wait until August first when I start my vacation and can get away from this noisy city.”

So sure was the Transit Authority of its invincibility, it could lie with ease. When a local radio station, WMCA, came to our assistance and editorialized that “progress doesn’t have to be made at the expense of a community’s eardrums,” the TA asked for and received equal time to rebut. “Every effort,” its spokesman told the radio audience, “has been made to minimize the noise.”

The noisemakers also played deaf. The March 1965 issue of The Bulletin, published by The General Contractors Association, contained a paean to the “advances” made in silencing construction equipment. “Why,” raved its anonymous author, it’s getting so that the construction industry will have eliminated practically all noise with the exception of the raucous yells of the journeymen….In review it is remarkable how little noise is left by the construction industry in its daily activity. The sound of a tuba is a disturber of the peace compared to what the manufacturers have been able to do with the air compressors these days….They purr a muted throbbing hum that is as docile and as soothing as Brahms’ Lullaby.”

This appeared more than two years before quieter American compressors reached the market.

The TA knew of the misery and ill-will it was causing the residents of upper Sixth Avenue. How else explain its unprecedented modesty in not decorating the subway project with the names of the Commissioners and the Chief Engineer and the rest of the credits that usually accompany a new project? Even a new subway entrance gets a big billboard with everybody’s name. But not this immense rare project. Modesty, shame–or a wish to escape additional complaints? Agencies like the Transit Authority should be taking the initiative in encouraging the design of quieter equipment. Instead, when USANAA suggested that the rock drills could be accessory-muffled, the TA replied:

There are no rock drills with noise suppressors available. Inquiries to manufacturers of rock drills reveal that there is not enough of a demand for this type of equipment to justify their production. When such equipment is made generally available, its use by subway contractors will be encouraged by the Transit Authority.

Where is this demand to come from, if not from giant public users of such equipment like this very agency?

So USANAA lost the battle of residential Sixth Avenue. But it started a nation-wide renaissance of education and action for noise abatement.

We had learned a good deal. For one thing, it became obvious that the noise problem was no simple neighborhood nuisance, and that what was urgently needed was a community-wide citizens’ noise abatement organization with a broad spectrum of members, including physicians, scientists, clergymen, businessmen, noise control experts, and the communications media.

In May 1966 I attended (and addressed) the IVth International Congress for Noise Abatement in Baden-Baden, West Germany. While there I discovered there were noise-reduced air compressors and jackhammers on the market–in Europe; that there were superior noise laws–in Europe; and that Europeans considered noise as more than a mere nuisance. With this information I was able to persuade attorney and writer on public affairs John Wharton to act as one of the founders of what we later named Citizens for a Quieter City, Inc. (CQC). Dr. Samuel Rosen, the eminent ear surgeon and auditory researcher, agreed to serve as Chairman of the Board, and Jerome Nathanson, a Leader, N.Y. Society for Ethical Culture, agreed to serve as President.

During this formative period I kept abreast of noise abatement developments by joining the Acoustical Society of America, reading its Journal and attending its meetings and seminars on noise control. In addition I read everything I could find on the subject of noise, its effects on man, and its control.

CQC began operating in January 1967, gradually developing into a recognized “voice of the knowledgeable concerned citizen.” We prepared and disseminated a variety of noise abatement literature, experimented with a newsletter, presented papers before professional societies, sent representatives to noise-related meetings, and accepted invitations to testify before government hearings. We encouraged Mayor Lindsay to authorize a Mayor’s Task Force on Noise Control. We endorsed the birth of New York City’s pioneering Bureau of Noise Abatement. We were responsible for an improvement in the noise insulation provisions of the City’s new building code (adopted in November 1968).

More than just raising and clarifying the noise issue, CQC proposed and stimulated solutions.

We initiated New York City’s “quiet garbage truck” project, inspired by what I saw in Baden-Baden.

We inspired the development of a quiet metal garbage can, an innovation that became a national symbol of applied noise control.

We also imported, and publicly demonstrated, a quieter jackhammer and air compressor, and reminded the American pneumatic tool industry that the American public was waiting. American versions appeared on the market several months after this demonstration.

Hard work and perseverance was forcing society to move off dead center.

The very existence of CQC became a constant reminder of public concern for noise in the environment. We were cited in government reports, and I was appointed to the Commerce Technical Advisory Board Noise Abatement Panel, U.S. Department of Commerce, established at the direction of the White House in 1968.

The end of the ’60s saw the beginning, not of noise abatement, but at least of the setting of ceilings on noise. In 1968 Congress authorized the FAA to certificate aircraft for noise, and in May of 1969 a new regulation required that industry doing more than $10,000 worth of business with the Federal government reduce noise levels so as to not deafen more than ten per cent of its workers.

These noise-oriented activities are only a beginning. Not more than skirmishes against the tyranny of noise.

It may be true that the meek shall inherit the earth, but that will be because it won’t be livable, and the noisemaker will be living on other planets. Whether under geodesic domes or under water, the goal for our cities must be as quiet an environment as necessary for human comfort and well-being. This goal is achievable if we end our passive acceptance of industry’s acoustic waste products.