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Ask A Native New Yorker: How Do I Deal With Noisy Neighbors?
By
Gothamist Staff
Published Feb 21, 2014
Modified Feb 21, 2014
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By
Gothamist Staff
Published Feb 21, 2014
Modified Feb 21, 2014
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Are you relatively new to this fine metropolis? Don't be shy about it, everyone was new to New York once upon a time... except, of course, those battle-hardened residents who've lived here their whole lives and Know It All. One of these lifers works among us at Gothamist—publisher Jake Dobkin grew up in Park Slope and currently resides in Brooklyn Heights. He is now fielding questions—ask him anything by sending an email here, but be advised that Dobkin is "not sure you guys will be able to handle my realness." We can keep you anonymous if you prefer; just let us know what neighborhood you live in.
This week's question comes from a New Yorker whose noisy neighbors are making him homicidal.
Dear Native New Yorker,
Some new neighbors recently moved in to the apartment above mine, and right away I noticed them stomping around, every single night. Also sometimes it sounds like they're pushing furniture back and forth. Once I think I heard them having sex‚ or torturing a bird. It was one of those sounds that's hard to place but which I will never forget.
They've been doing this at all hours, so not only am I not sleeping because of the noise, I'm not sleeping because I'm worrying the noise is going to start, and also sometimes I fantasize about killing them. How do you deal with noisy neighbors and related annoyances of apartment life?
Sincerely,
The Rectifier
A young Jake Dobkin embraces the thunderous cacophony of Niagara Falls. (Courtesy Private Jake Dobkin Collection)
A Native New Yorker responds.
Dear Rectifier,
You must chill: you seem to be somewhat tightly wound! This state of uptight hyper-vigilance will make many aspects of city life acutely and unnecessarily painful for you. Your trigger appears to be noise‚ but I've met New Yorkers with neurotic derangements centered around the smell of their neighbors' cigarette smoke, or the way their colleague at the next desk sneezes, or about hanging out with a friend rumored to have bedbugs, or how able-bodied people ride an elevator to the second floor instead of just walking up the fucking stairs like decent human beings.
People are annoying in all sorts of ways, and one of the things you can be sure about living in New York is that you will be exposed to many people doing many annoying things at many hours of the day and night.
So how to deal? Buddhists say that all suffering is caused by desire. Here, for instance, your desire to live in silence. Zen philosophers would probably see that as a form of avoidance of the sense reality of your present urban moment, or something. So you could, over the coming months and years, devote yourself to silent meditation, returning again and again to the feeling of discomfort that hearing your neighbors doing the nasty engenders in you, until slowly it becomes bearable and finally irrelevant. But you're probably saying to yourself something like "Jesus Christ, I can see the lights rattling and it's three a.m.—I need relief NOW!"
Allow me to offer another technique, which I discovered on an airplane a few years ago. I was flying with my kid, who was about a year and a half old, and he was screaming and kicking the seat in front of him, and despite our honest efforts to calm him down, the people in the next row were giving us death looks. And I thought back to when I was younger and travelled a lot and how annoyed I got when I got caught next to a noisy baby. But then I saw that sometimes the wheel of karma spins forward and sometimes it spins back: sometimes you're the one suffering through the noise, and sometimes you're the one making making the noise that causes others to suffer. If you are lucky to live long enough, the scales balance.
Think back now to all the times when you were younger and you and your annoying friends stayed up late blasting your "youth music" without thinking about your neighbors who had to wake up early the next morning to go to work, the poor slobs. Maybe you even once had sex in your apartment in less than perfect mechanical silence! Those are the karmic debts that you are now repaying. You are the people upstairs, man. Like Ginsberg said: "It occurs to me that I am America / I am talking to myself again."
This is probably not an immediate comfort to you. You could, of course, try more worldly solutions, like writing a polite note, and slipping it under the door. Or, when that doesn't work, calling 311 to narc on them repeatedly. Or when they find out that you've been doing that, and just make more noise to get even, banging on the ceiling repeatedly with a broomstick. Or, when they ignore that, doing that trick where you leave a bag of dog shit in their mailbox.
Or when that gets you evicted from the building, finding a new apartment on a higher floor, in a pre-war building with thick walls, or in one of those new developments with the insane triple-pane windows and noise-canceling stuff in the wall. But none of that will cure your underlying problem, which is your inability to relax and your tendency to externalize your anxiety by blaming others, and so you'll just find yourself getting upset about some new thing.
So consider working on that. If meditation doesn't work, try therapy, or exercise, or getting religion. There are many roads up this mountain, but you must get to the summit somehow; the alternative is becoming one of those old, crotchety people who are annoyed by everyone, who no one can stand to be around.
Existence itself is loud, no matter where you roam on this rowdy rock. Be grateful you even have your hearing—there are plenty of deaf people who would probably kill for the opportunity to overhear their neighbors' watching Fast & Furious 6 one more time. And if all else fails, remember that we live in the Golden Age of noise canceling headphones.
N.B.: The two best songs about annoying neighbors are "The Apartment Song," by Tom Petty, and "Duncan," by Paul Simon. The worst song about annoying neighbors is "Noisy Neighbour" by Akon.
Ask a Native New Yorker anything by emailing our tips hotline.
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