Downtown Boomtown Shows No Sign of Quieting Down
As the City’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) rolls out a new app, NYCNoise – which will allow residents across the city to measure decibel levels, classify noise types, and document noise hotspots, and will help DEP target inspections and enforcement – Lower Manhattan residents may have reason to invest in a first-rate pair of earplugs.
The app is available free for download at the Apple App Store here and Google Play Store here. Users will be able to document the time, date, location, and source of any noise – jackhammers, garbage trucks, air conditioning units, helicopters, bars, party boats, etc. – by taking a five-second reading.
An analysis of noise complaint statistics from the City’s Open Data portal shows that in the year to date, Lower Manhattan residents called 311 to complain about the racket 6,414 times, or approximately 20 times each day since January 1.
For context, this comes to slightly more than 20 percent of the total number of 31,447 complaints from Lower Manhattan for all causes during the same period, and roughly 3.8 percent of total noise complaints from Manhattan as a whole.
Among Downtown’s four major residential enclaves, Battery Park City appears to be the quietest, with only 654 noise complaints so far this year, and Tribeca is the loudest, with 4,616 such calls. The Financial District comes in second with 2,095 complaints, and the South Street Seaport neighborhood registered 1,288 criticisms of the cacophony.
These tabulations may indicate a deteriorating trend line. A November 2021 analysis of noise in Lower Manhattan (also based in the City’s Open Data portal) showed that Battery Park City and the Financial District combined then logged a total of 948 noise complaints (versus the new aggregated total of 2,749) while the joint tally for Tribeca and SoHo was 1,949 calls about noise (compared with more than double that total for Tribeca alone this year).