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The City That Always Sleeps
October 4, 2002
by John Bloom
NEW YORK -- At the corner of Bleecker and Macdougal, in the heart of Greenwich Village, where Jack Kerouac once held forth during all-night drinking bouts and the Mafia once threw three-day wedding parties, there were cops this weekend roaming the sidewalks with . . . decibel meters!
Checking the neighborhood for violations of a noise ordinance.
What is the world coming to? In the city that never sleeps, the Village has always been the least sleepy neighborhood. Why would Dylan Thomas choose this particular patch of earth to drink himself to death in, if not for the fact that it was the rowdiest continuous party on the planet?
Is this some kind of alternate universe in which Los Angeles and New York have traded municipal ordinances? After all, L.A. just named former New York police commissioner William Bratton its new police chief.
But the Village? The Village is all about noise. The Village is the place people go specifically to be noisy. The jazz clubs are noisy, the dance clubs are noisy, even the tin-roofed bistros are noisy from conversation alone. And you've always been able to walk past the Bitter End, the historic showplace for folk and rock music, and hear an entire set from the sidewalk. The Village is the place where the rising of the sun is everyone's signal that it might be time to go to bed.
When I lived in the Village, not so long ago, the day's schedule--pretty much observed by all the writers, artists, musicians and other self-employed people who lived there--went like this:
11 a.m.: Drag your butt out of bed.
Noon: Go to the Italian bakery for breakfast. Read the paper. Return to life.
1 p.m.: Shops open.
2 p.m. to 10 p.m.: The working day. Do whatever you have to do, punctuated by espresso runs.
4 p.m.: Lunch at John's Pizza. Heckle a Marxist.
10 p.m.: Bars start to stir. Wind down with the spirit of your choice.
Midnight: Dance clubs open.
4 a.m.: Change from the legal club to the after-hours speakeasy where the jazz players jam after work.
6 a.m.: Seek shelter.
11 a.m.: Repeat.
Now here's my question. If the neighborhood is set up this way, why would, say, an early-retiring Wall Street broker want a townhouse here in the first place? Because that's what happened. Various financial swells poured into the neighborhood and refurbished hundred-year-old buildings, instead of buying in a perfectly orderly quiet restrained neighborhood like the Upper East Side. And then they started complaining about the noise! (After all, they have to get up and, even more outrageous, put clothes on.)
This is like moving to Paris and then complaining because there are too many French people there.
I blame it on the growing Old Fogeydom of New York, and America in general, as the influence-heavy baby boomers start to get prostate cancer and discover the pleasures of 24-hour-a-day digital TV. They're not Young Turks anymore, although you'll occasionally see an 80-year-old beatnik cursing the traffic as he taps his cane across Christopher Street--and actually those guys look like they're still rather spry and active. But the Old Turks want to take the place of their youth and turn it into the place of their retirement.
Earlier this year the Village Voice ran an article about the "Take Back Our Streets" movement in the Village, and they reported it like they were filing from a strange town in the Midwest. You didn't really get the sense that the Village Voice reporter regarded the Village as the home of the Village Voice! It wasn't "Here's what we want for our community." It was "Here's what the people in the Village want for their community." Has the Voice become a mere office building for commuters from Hoboken or something?
At any rate, the essence of the article was that the new gentry were outraged by the young rowdies who descended on the Village every night, but mostly on weekends, to raise alcohol- fueled hell. The natives wanted to sleep--even on Saturday nights!
And that eventually resulted in "Operation Silent Night," the city's official crackdown on noise that began last weekend. One of the first citations was issued to Carpo's Cafe, right there at Macdougal and Bleecker, where all the famous coffeehouses and sidewalk cafes are. The offense: classical music being played too loudly. (Intrusive Rachmaninoff?)
I can just imagine what will happen the first time the Hell's Angels roar over from their headquarters on East 3rd Street. Will some unfortunate cop be dispatched to actually ticket the Harleys?
Then there's the long-standing Village tradition of cruising with car stereos outfitted with bass speakers that can rock the foundations of the Washington Arch. Not to mention the tradition of pub-crawling itself, which inevitably involves yaa-hooing in the interims between drinking establishments.
This is what happens when people start merely residing in a city instead of using it. I'm sure that Liza doesn't like it, and we can be grateful that Frank didn't live to see it. What's truly frightening, though, is that these California trends seem to be so exportable these days. With Bleecker Street under siege, is Bourbon Street next?
Please tell me that couldn't happen.
© Copyright 2002 United Press International and John Bloom