cheryl
Administrator
Staff member
Listening to My Neighbors Fight - The Atlantic
When people are crammed into cities, there’s not much privacy, and neighbors become spectators to one another’s personal lives.
At 11:15 p.m. on a recent weeknight, I was turning off the lights in my apartment to start winding down for sleep when I heard yelling from upstairs. It was different from the sound of the children who live directly overhead playing, being rambunctious, stomping around, being annoying. These were angry voices. I was in pajamas, but I opened my front door so I could hear more clearly, and I was greeted with a flurry of f-bombs. There I was in my hallway, doing a cost/benefit analysis of intervention—a familiar position.
I've lived in a wide variety of apartments in New York City over the past 20 years, but a sad through line, from the jam-packed railroad apartment I shared with three roommates in Hell’s Kitchen to my current home where I live with my husband and dog in Boerum Hill, has been overhearing neighbors fighting. A vicious fact about living in New York City is that, except for the Russian oligarchs who rent huge apartments but never seem to occupy them, we are all crammed in here. We mass commute. We have few personal spaces and little privacy. We live with a built-in audience. I have cried on subways and streets and in Duane Reades and Best Buys, and I have sat on a stranger’s stoop at 2 a.m., broken down by a mixture of whiskey and existential despair.
Home is different. If I practice karaoke songs in the shower or sing to my dog in my living room, yes, I run the risk of people overhearing me. But I would be mortified if anyone asked me to tone it down, because my neighbors and I have an unspoken agreement: I will tolerate your moderately loud music, your late-night gatherings, your TV laughs and your sex noises and your errant farts, and you will tolerate my own.
When people are crammed into cities, there’s not much privacy, and neighbors become spectators to one another’s personal lives.
At 11:15 p.m. on a recent weeknight, I was turning off the lights in my apartment to start winding down for sleep when I heard yelling from upstairs. It was different from the sound of the children who live directly overhead playing, being rambunctious, stomping around, being annoying. These were angry voices. I was in pajamas, but I opened my front door so I could hear more clearly, and I was greeted with a flurry of f-bombs. There I was in my hallway, doing a cost/benefit analysis of intervention—a familiar position.
I've lived in a wide variety of apartments in New York City over the past 20 years, but a sad through line, from the jam-packed railroad apartment I shared with three roommates in Hell’s Kitchen to my current home where I live with my husband and dog in Boerum Hill, has been overhearing neighbors fighting. A vicious fact about living in New York City is that, except for the Russian oligarchs who rent huge apartments but never seem to occupy them, we are all crammed in here. We mass commute. We have few personal spaces and little privacy. We live with a built-in audience. I have cried on subways and streets and in Duane Reades and Best Buys, and I have sat on a stranger’s stoop at 2 a.m., broken down by a mixture of whiskey and existential despair.
Home is different. If I practice karaoke songs in the shower or sing to my dog in my living room, yes, I run the risk of people overhearing me. But I would be mortified if anyone asked me to tone it down, because my neighbors and I have an unspoken agreement: I will tolerate your moderately loud music, your late-night gatherings, your TV laughs and your sex noises and your errant farts, and you will tolerate my own.