I had just moved into a ramshackle shoebox in New York’s East Village, a neighborhood slouching toward gentrification while nostalgically clinging to its gritty bohemian 1980’s past. People were starting to pay top dollar to move into the very tenements their immigrant great-grandparents couldn’t wait to get out of.
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I’m reading many of your posts as I get time. (Full disclosure: I am your uncle.) This one hit home because I’d been on both sides of the noise/music argument. The first one was when I played Procol Harum at high volume and had my neighbor knock at my door and proceed to throw me up against my apartment wall. The second time, I was the complainer about loud music from the floor below. That one ended in me calling the police (not the best negotiators in this instance, I reckoned, because my downstairs neighbor was recalcitrant forevermore.) May I say, that several years had passed between the two incidents. There was no “super” in either case. And just as my tolerance for loudness had changed over those years, I’m supposing the whole field of mediation has changed since then, and my own views on mediation have also changed. We could have used mediators back then…. Now, being the father of a seventeen year old hip-hop fanatic who loves the big bass sounds of that genre, I’m thinking twice about calling the police.
Thank for reading, Jim, and for recounting what is likely the only documented case of Procol Harum-based violence.