Noise is in the ear of the beholder, by which I mean that noise may be, in theory, too loud, but most of the time, noise is a matter of socio-economic, class-based, age-related taste, which has very little to do with volume and much to do with some young punk driving down your street at 3 a.m. in a stick-shift car with a lousy muffler.
That was a long sentence, wasn’t it? I’m sorry; I’m a bit off my feed. I normally write in short, loud bursts, but I’m trying to write this one in long, languid, quiet phrases, because I think some folks in Quincy might read this – and you know how they are about noise.
Quincy is engaged in a long-running dispute with the bars and clubs at Marina Bay, which, as you can tell from its name, was built to be a monastery for monks who want to live a quiet life of prayer and contemplation. Instead, the monks threw off their robes and turned the place into a raucous bar scene with loud crowds and louder music and late hours and gallons of evil demon rum.
The nearby condo dwellers probably wouldn’t have minded some amplified Bach sonatas and a crowd of sedate cognac drinkers, but the Great Unwashed Masses have no manners and lousy taste in music.
As the author Cleveland Amory explained it many years ago, “The New England conscience doesn’t keep you from doing what you shouldn’t; it just keeps you from enjoying it.”
What was the poor Quincy City Council to do?
Have you been to Marina Bay and environs? The bars are cool, the condos are nice, the development is, in the aggregate, exactly the kind of way-cool place that Massachusetts needs to stop everyone under the age of 60 from moving to Austin or Palo Alto to make computer chips and stuff.
So, the council, for the first time since John Quincy Adams sang loud hymns in the shower while he shampooed his wig, passed a town noise ordinance, limiting the volume of, well, noise, and suggesting very strongly that Gregorian chants might be the appropriate entertainment for Saturday nights in the big city.
Noises Off
A little bit more than a week later, Mayor Thomas Koch turned down the volume on his recording of “The Best of the Boston Pops” long enough to hear the threats from attorneys vowing to take the town to court and the complaints by insomniacs that the noise ordinance didn’t set the volume low enough.
With the “1812 Overture” playing in the background (not too loudly), Mayor Tom vetoed the thing, leaving the town in a raucous, noisy, befuddled status quo. As the old folky/blue grass favorite tells it, “It Takes a Worried Man to Sing a Worried Song.”
In fact, noise ordinances are complicated to get right. The language, both as a matter of law and common sense, isn’t easy. Even as we speak, the American Civil Liberties Union is torturing Omaha, Neb., over its noise ordinance, which sort of, kind of, maybe, tells businesses that if five or more people are gathered in prayerful drinking outside their joints late at night, it is a “nuisance” and a violation of the laws of God, Man and Omaha.
A few years ago, a federal judge squashed Seattle’s regulation on street performers, who, by their nature, are, well, you know, noisy. As the judge explained, the rules were so prickly that “a latter-day Gene Kelly cannot sing in the rain.”
And even if you can write a noise ordinance that sings in perfect four-part harmony, enforcement can be a messy exercise in discretion. Early in June, the crime fighters in Phoenix, Ariz., came down hard on Bishop Richard Painter of the Cathedral of Christ the King. His church bells were too loud. He violated the town’s noise ordinance.
Hartford, Conn., a city full of rambunctious actuaries, was named the quietest town in America this year by a national magazine. The chamber of commerce and travel and tourism folks were thrilled. Wouldn’t want to be all noisy and fun like Quincy.
