Noisy Neighbors
Okay, so in this case, we’re the “noisy neighbors.” We recently moved from Manhattan into a brownstone in Park Slope. Our new place has outdoor space (that we pay a premium for) and we’re definitely planning to utilize the space during the summer months. My husband and I both work until 7pm so the only…
Okay, so in this case, we’re the “noisy neighbors.”
We recently moved from Manhattan into a brownstone in Park Slope. Our new place has outdoor space (that we pay a premium for) and we’re definitely planning to utilize the space during the summer months. My husband and I both work until 7pm so the only time to take advantage of the backyard is in the evenings as we tend to travel on the weekends. Over the past week we have been out back gardening (trying to beautify our new outdoor space) until about 10pm and one weeknight we had friends over until just before 10pm. I would say that 99% of the time it will just be me and my husband out back and when we’re out there we often play music, but at what I would consider a reasonable level (for example, I can’t hear it when I enter the apartment and close the door). Coming from Manhattan, we’re used to playing music and in most cases being some of the quieter people in our old building. We understand that we live near a lot of families with young children now and we’re trying to find a balance between enjoying our outdoor space and being respectful of our neighbors.
We received a complaint from one of our neighbors that we are being too noisy and that music is meant to be kept indoors in our new neighborhood. As I said, we want to be respectful of our neighbors and certainly don’t want to start off on the wrong foot, but we also want to enjoy our space. When we signed the lease on our apartment nodoby mentioned a “music indoors” rule.
So, here’s my question, is playing music at reasonable levels until 9 or 10pm disrespectful? If so, what would be a reasonable time to play music until?
We would like to come to some sort of arrangement with our neighbors where we stop playing music at some designated hour, but that we still have a right to play music until that point in time without complaints or dirty looks on the street. We think that requesting that music stay indoors at all times is somewhat unreasonable. Would love to hear your thoughts…
i’m kind of surprised no one has mentioned this solution:
The Cones of Silence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Silence
i’m kind of surprised that no one has mentioned this solution: wireless headphones. they’ll give you the music you want while you’re working and you won’t disturb your neighbors at all.
i suggest this as someone who lives next door to a going-deaf elderly woman who listens to talk radio in her back yard approximately 8 hours a day, and sometimes so loud that i can identify the stations she’s listening to from inside my house with the windows closed. only way i got her to turn it down was to shame her with the offer to buy her a pair of headphones. (she’s definitely wealthy enough to afford them herself.)
also, with this kind of issue, there’s the ‘recurrence factor.’ if the woman next door to me only did this one day a week, say, i might never have complained. but the fact that it was every day–or, in your case, every night–that gets to be more than a little grating.
John, I think I’m moving to your block – been reading on other Brooklyn blogs about the South Slope Bagpiper. Nine PM on Sundays, huh? Guess we’ll have to close the windows and have the TV up loud, unless DH wants to get out his kilt (he’s Scottish) and march round the nabe!
You people are all way too uptight. This is New York City. Should I ask my downstairs neighbor to stop snoring all the time because I can hear him through the floor boards? Should I ask my upstairs neighbor to kill her cat because it runs around the apartment jumping on things at 6am? Or force the people next door to sell their children because they wake up at 3am crying? You should all get off your high horses and learn how to deal living in an urban environment. Playing music loud for a party is one thing, but a little soft music for relaxing outdoors is not any different than someone’s footsteps or crying yuppie babies.
Get a life.
There’s a guy somewhere on my block that practies the bagpipes at 9 at night almost every Sunday. He’s so bad, and so $%#ing loud you can’t hold a converation outside while he’s playing. It’s tough to tell where the sound is coming from but I think he gets on the roof so more people can hear him versus muffling the din by playing in his house.
Now THAT’S obnoxious.
I can settle this all..
Think of the precedent you are setting by asking your neighbors for some leniency in playing your music…next thing you know everyone is doing it and you are the ones going crazy because you don’t like rap or heavy rock or opera for that matter..
if you start this it will not end nicely for anyone and you will be the ones to blame..
10:26, I gotta agree with you. I’m a musician, I spend most of my life living through my ears, but I don’t get this background-musical-accompaniment-to-everything-I-do, mood setting crap. I just don’t get it. If I’m in a garden, I want to hear the birds, the distant echoes of voices or the hum of passing cars. Or just the silence of the evening. Or my friends chatting. But that’s just me.
I certainly would not consider sharing my musical appetite with people who didn’t actually consent to it. It’s borderline molestation. And definitely provocative.
And that’s not just me. That’s just the reality of living in the city.
If you have the luxury of leaving the city, perhaps you should use that time to rock out.
Wow. Don’t you people realize that you live in a city?
I have always thought of myself as being really noise sensitive. Until now.
My own thoughts about music:
1. I don’t want to hear your music at a volume I can’t ignore or drown out.
2. I don’t want to hear your music invading my house for longer than about an hour.
3. I don’t want to get to know you as That Norah Jones (or whatever) Asshole.
4. But man, I also don’t want to commit you to a lonely ipod experience!
To let your neighbor occasionally rock out or whatever is to be neighborly. It is equally neighborly not to take advantage of other people’s understanding.
This neighborhood has lots of young kids who go to bed by 8. It’s obnoxious to have music loud enough to hear in someone else’s apartment after 8, except for a rare Saturday night party. You’re obviously a sensitive couple, so I’d turn down the music.