Friday, June 12, 2009

Note from the Backside #4

Just when you thought it had gone away, the Backside returns. This time, an audio-video mini documentary. The best part comes at 20 seconds into the video, showing how sound travels through windows closed and open.

As the Backsider writes, "We hear every drunken inanity." Now you can too!






More Notes:
Note 1
Note 2
Note 3

29 comments:

Bowery Boogie said...

seems like this situation will get worse before it gets better. honestly, how would anyone react in that situation? if we went to their abode (likely uptown) and opened a bar in their backyard, it would be a travesty of epic proportions. their home bubble can't be disturbed....

...just ours.

Barbara L. Hanson said...

I've got way too hot a temper; I'd be in jail by now if they were outside my window.

jfmontone said...

I'd like to do a radio interview about this rooftop bar...maybe Monday morning 9 A.M......any neighbors losing sleep would be great.

John Montone
1010 WINS

montone@wins.com
646-739-8329

Anonymous said...

Time to use some old school malodorous tactics... there are too many to list. Fish emulsion (available at any hardware store or garden center) is very effective.
Civil Disobedience = civil defense

Anonymous said...

Aw c'mon, people. The hotel has to play music to get their patrons to keep swilling booze. How you going to move booze if there isn't music playing?

Anonymous said...

Isn't there any legal recourse with this? Isn't it possible for the tenants of the building to bring a class action suit against them? This gets me so pissed, and I don't even live there. I'm with BaHa, if it was me there I would have most definitely lost it already and probably been thrown in the slammer.

Anonymous said...

I want to urge everyone to keep calling 311 and logging complaints. Even if they say there is a complaint already, insist that they take yours. The number of complaints can really figure in when permits and licenses come up for renewal. You have to be relentless.

hoover factory said...

Two words: urine mist.

Ty said...

Can't you throw a bucket of spaghetti sauce or toilet water on them?

henry said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

thanks for keeping on top of these guys, jeremiah. i wish nyc would have a law that you couldn't open a bar within 20 feet of a residential window. would that be asking too much?

RollerSkatingChampof7thStreet said...

great idea, henry! what i would like is some kind of technology where average internet users would somehow be able to make noise back at the patrons, to yell at them.
any idea how that could work?

Jeremiah Moss said...

the camera is an interesting idea, especially in this age of total surveillance.

Anonymous said...

Henry--that's a brilliant idea.

Given the sheer amount of concentrated narcissism shown by the Cooper Hotel's management and guests, they can't possibly complain about being on camera, can they? After all, don't they lug cameras everywhere so they can post drunken photos of themselves all over various "social networking" sites?

henry said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Why appeal to the vanity of a group that is probably dying for their 15 minutes?

Bad idea in my opinion, would likely encourage more boisterous and rude behavior from guests.

honey west said...

Great idea from henry, and how about excerpting a few of the most inane comments and playing them on a loop, at high volume, back at the patio? maybe the sound of their own shrieking will repel them, like one of those pest control devices

Anonymous said...

One can have a web-cam and stream it on various sites. Justin.tv has some streams. I'd love to see this done.
I'd get a foam soaker filled with fish juice and soak everyone down on a daily basis, or soak the deck so it stinks too bad to use without people being involved. (SKUNK?)

Anonymous said...

The tenants should definitely get together and sue. The legal theory is called "nuisance", their use of the outdoor space impedes your use of your apartment. With the negative publicity this is getting, once a suit is filed, they would cave and settle pretty damn quick. Get this in front of a native new yorker judge and you might even get an injunction prohibiting people from being out there say, past 10. If that happens, when you call the cops, there will be a criminal case against the hotel and you might even be able to get the manager hauled off to the tombs for breaking the injunction/contempt.

Laura Goggin Photography said...

Hit them where it hurts - in the liquor license. There have been reports of hotel guests drinking on the sidewalk and in front of the neighboring building - catch this on film and take it to court.

Anonymous said...

Apparently I am an outsider among all the vitriol being spewed here.

However: Whatever happened to "live and let live"?

This is NYC. Not only NYC, but the Bowery in the East Village. Not exactly a quiet quaint block of Park Slope.

The Bowery has been an ugly eyesore for so long. This hotel has brought some life and beauty to the street, as has the Bowery Hotel.

P.S. I am not affiliated with the businesses.
P.S.S. I live on one of the noisiest nightlife blocks in the city.

Anonymous said...

I'd get a big speaker and play speeches from foreign leaders with harsh sounding languages like german, israeli, and yemeni..... they'd fix the problems fast....

also farrekan would work.

Anonymous said...

A solution is for the hotel to build a beautiful pergola covered in green leafy grapevines or clematis, wisteria over the entire second floor patio. (Remember Va Tutto's garden?) It will remove the bar guests from sight of the apartments, give them something green and pretty to look at, and deaden the sound. The onus is on the hotel to give their neighbors something nice outside their windows.

Anonymous said...

You want peace and quiet, move to the country you prentetious ass wipes. You chose to live in New York City, what were you expecting?

henry said...

Ah! Name-calling! That kind of maturity -- you must be a patron, yeah?

Anonymous said...

solution:

giant stereo in window playing neil young's "metal music" on infinite repeat.

Anonymous said...

To the person who said "You chose to live in NYC..." Well thats not true for everyone. You are assuming that everyone moves to NYC to seek fame and fortune, which is a very yuppie, privileged, eurocentric assumption. Some people did not choose to live here, and never MOVED here... they were BORN here. Yes, there are actually native NYers in the EV! Their entire lives-- family, friends-- are here, and have been here since birth. For some people "moving to the country" is not an option.

newbowery@mac.c0m said...

does'nt the outdoor space close at 9pm? on bowery and bleecker i hear the noise pollution of at least 4 bars until 3am. i dont like it but i realize i live in the most vibrant and dynamic city in the world and quiet isnt part of the deal. yes, i long for the days when it felt like i had the whole bowery to my self on any given night (except for a few CB's punks and the drunk bodies passed out on the sidewalk you had to walk around), but historically speaking those quiet years on the bowery (1970's-early 90's) were just the street taking a disco nap. for the majority of the 200 years the street has been densely populated it has been crowded with a noisy inconsiderate mob looking for a good time. 120 years ago there were over 100 bars between cooper and chatham sq. and half as many hotels. thats HOTELS not quiet flop houses. maybe you should just consider your self lucky that you got to enjoy a few of the down years before things picked up again? i am doing everything i can to preserve whats left of the 19th c. bowery and i would urge you to be realistic in the battles you pick and the rhetoric you use. most people will say you have an unrealistic expectation of silence given where you live because the sound of humans being human is something we all deal with as new yorkers and have for 300 years. with the exception of a few down years when this city was abandoned by its population seeking the post war american dream in the suburbs where they did not have to listen to other humans being human. that soundscape was as much a part of this city as the bowery its self is. in the late 20th c. the grandchildren of the suburban exiles began to come back to the city and thought they were entitled to bring their privlidged suburban silence and quality of life with them, and the early comers got it for a while and were spoiled and thought it was part of the deal and foolishly came to think of this as a "right". everyone wants to be the last one to move into their neighborhood...
so this new bowery is pretty much the same one our grandparents left except there were 10,000 more douche bags 100 years ago and there was more death and more danger and more noise and there was a good damn train right outside your window spitting burning embers of coal and rattling the pictures off of your dank walls every other minute and when you opened you window all you smelled was horse shit and the refuse of 5 million noisy people half of which were dying of TB or the flu or exhaustion..
that was why they left the city for dead the first chance they got. maybe your grandparents left all of that out of the family history because they thought you would stay in the suburbs and live the better life they dreamt for you? maybe you should have.

Anonymous said...

newbowery: you make some very valid points. The lower east side at the turn of the century was a disgusting cesspool of disease and poverty that my immigrant relatives couldn't wait to escape. However I cannot sympathize totally with your point of view. Its not "human noise" that I object to-- its a certain TYPE of human noise. When I first moved to the EV, my Peurto Rican neighbors were very loud. Loud music, yelling up to the windows, screaming kids, etc. I never complained. They were here before me. This was their neighborhood and I recognized that and was respectful of that. They were poor and they had hard lives. Music gave them some enjoyment. No problem. The current noise, however-- privileged, overindulged young frat boys and their female counterparts in $500 shoes drinking $25 martinis flooding the neighborhood to scream, fight, piss, vomit, honk their horns and then drive home drunk to the suburbs without a care in the world or a passing thought or bit of respect for other people-- sorry, I'm just not down with that genre of "human noise". To me that is not human.